What a clipboard manager does that Win+V does not
Windows has its own clipboard history on Win+V, but it keeps a short list and cannot find a word inside a picture you copied. A clipboard manager replaces it with a longer memory and tools for using what you copied. This one holds 100 clips out of the box, with a choice of 50, 250 or 500 instead, and pins the ones you reuse so they never fall off the end.
From any program, Ctrl+Alt+C brings the board up at the center of your display, cursor already in the search box. Type a few letters, pick a clip with the arrow keys or the mouse, and Enter pastes it into the window you came from. Press the same shortcut again, hit Esc or click elsewhere and the board goes away. Both shortcuts can be re-recorded in Settings if another program already uses them.
Clips are sorted into kinds you can filter with one click: Links, Code, Colors, Images and Files, or All. A copied URL is labeled with the title of the page it points to, a hex or RGB value appears as a little patch of that color, and code snippets are tagged with their language, such as SQL, Python, PowerShell or C#, and highlighted. Contact details, street addresses and paths are marked with icons of their own, so a long history stays easy to scan.
Copy text from a screenshot, then search for it later
When you copy a screenshot or a picture, the app runs it through the text recognition built into Windows and stores the words beside the image. The search box placeholder says it plainly: Search item, even text inside images. That means an order number in a receipt photo, an error message in a screen grab or a line from a slide can be found by typing it, even though you never copied it as text.
If you would rather not keep pictures at all, switch off Keep images in Settings.
Paste without formatting, and six other ways to paste
Text copied from a web page or a document usually drags its fonts and colors along. Select a clip and press Shift+Enter, or choose Paste as…, to rewrite it before it lands:
- Plain text, with the source formatting dropped
- UPPER CASE, lower case or Title Case
- Pretty JSON, which re-indents a single-line JSON blob
- URL-decoded, turning %20 and friends back into readable characters
- Link without tracking, which strips the tracking codes from a URL before you share it
Paste several clips in order with a paste queue
Filling in a form from scattered notes usually means switching windows for every field. Instead, tick the ones you want on the board; each one is numbered in the order you ticked it. Click into the first field of the form and use Ctrl+Alt+V. The first clip is pasted. Move to the next field and press it again for the second, and so on until the queue is empty. Clear queue empties it early.
To keep the board on screen while you work in another window, click the clip icon at the top to hold it open; click it again to let it close on its own.
