By Jason Snell

December 14, 2023 12:40 PM PT

The case for clipboard managers

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Last week, I walked myself through the process of realizing the power of macOS Defaults and how, over the two decades of modern macOS, Apple has addressed most of the basic needs of the average user. At the end of that process, I ended up discovering that the most glaring feature omission in all of macOS might just be its lack of a clipboard manager.

Response to that discovery has been… interesting. All the true nerds wrote in to agree vociferously about how they simply couldn’t live without one. Everyone else… has apparently spent the entire time they’ve been using a computer not using one and can’t really understand why they should care!

Let me walk you through the reasons why non-nerds should care, why Apple should consider making this a built-in macOS feature, and what apps you should try out if you decide to go for it. (If you prefer YouTube, you should probably just watch this excellent video from Stephen Robles from earlier this year.)

Breaking tradition

The clipboard’s weird, right? The Mac is credited with popularizing graphical user interfaces, but the clipboard is this invisible place where data lives, unseen but waiting to re-emerge at a later time. Rachel Greenham called it a liminal space stuff floats in the other day, and she’s not wrong. It’s like a little pocket universe.

But the clipboard exists at the heart of one of the greatest features of the Mac: the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands on the Mac’s Edit menu. It’s such a fundamental part of the computing experience that it’s kind of hard to conceive of what you’d do if you needed to get text from that web browser to that email window or from that word processor to that to-do app. (Drag and drop, maybe? So fiddly.)

Using copy/cut and paste feels like second nature, even to people who don’t consider themselves particularly sophisticated computer users. You pull it from here and put it over there. Even though it’s kind of esoteric—you have to use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item—I feel like regular users get it, internalize it, and use it pretty quickly. (Full credit to the Lisa group at Apple, who invented it in 1980.)

For all this time, the macOS Clipboard has been capable of holding one thing. It could be an enormous image file or a couple of characters of plain text—but if you copy something new, the old one goes away. One in, one out. (On classic macOS, the included Scrapbook desk accessory was a clever workaround since you could load it up with as much junk as you liked and then take it out later.)

Apple’s keeping the clipboard relatively untouched¹ for decades suggests its perfection as a concept and Apple’s implicit satisfaction with it. And yet… surely there’s more that could be done with it? For years, third-party apps have extended the clipboard in numerous ways, while Apple has done almost nothing.

Why a clipboard manager?

If I’m going to suggest that Apple add clipboard management to macOS, I need to make a case that it’s going to be valued by regular people and not get in the way of normal use. Cluttering up the Mac interface with gewgaws is bad for the user experience.

What works to my advantage here is the clipboard’s invisibility. Even when you’re using a clipboard manager, that liminal space is still invisible, and so far as you and your Mac and all your apps know, it contains one single item. Copy in, paste out. Nothing changes!

But here’s the beauty of it: With a clipboard manager, that liminal space no longer holds a single item. Behind the single item, there’s a big stack of previous items—a bit like how a browser tab only holds a single page, but the browser history remembers every previous page you’ve visited. Imagine if you took the back button and history away from a web browser. (It would be bad.)

The magic moment of using a clipboard manager comes when you realize you need to access something that’s not the One True Item on the clipboard. If you’re using the standard Mac clipboard and you copy something priceless and then, a minute later, copy something useless—welp, too bad, the priceless thing is gone, and it’s never coming back. A good clipboard manager lets you use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item to view your previous clipboards, choose the item you want to fish out and bring it back.

And that’s my pitch for why macOS should have its own clipboard manager: Because it adds undo to the clipboard via a discoverable mechanism like a keyboard shortcut and an item in the Edit menu right next to Cut, Copy, and Paste. For me, it’s become part of my Mac muscle memory: command-backslash brings up a long list of clipboard history, from which I can retrieve what I want.

It gets better. Once you know that copying something to your clipboard doesn’t destroy what’s there, your use of the clipboard can become far more extensive. You lose the fear of wiping out something important, replaced with confidence that you can grab something in case you want it later and stash it away in the clipboard history.

Using a clipboard manager also reduces a lot of annoying clicking back and forth between different apps. If you need to copy five items from a document and paste them into five different web form boxes, you don’t need to tab back and forth and copy them one at a time. Just copy all five, then move to the web form and paste them from history. It’s so much less annoying!

Beyond the basics

That’s my regular user case. Of course, there are power-user features that Apple could choose to implement—but in my opinion, they shouldn’t bother. Apple features are generally crowd-pleasers that leave a lot of the nitpicky details to be addressed by third-party apps. It should leave something for the third-party apps that I’m suggesting get Sherlocked.

Those power-user features can include things like semi-permanent “shelves” for commonly copied and pasted items or powerful filters that can convert clipboard content on the fly to different formats. (It’s pretty great to copy styled text and paste Markdown, for example.) Third-party clipboard managers let you add keystrokes for all sorts of items, including pasting two or three or more layers deep in the history. I’ve been using a clipboard manager for two decades, and even I don’t use most of these features, but they will absolutely fit perfectly into some workflows.

If you don’t have a clipboard manager, where can you get one? First off, you might already be using one! I use LaunchBar, which has one, and Keyboard Maestro, which also has one. If you use the launcher apps Alfred or Raycast, you’ve already got a clipboard manager installed.

When my friend Todd Vaziri surveyed social media asking for suggestions for a clipboard manager, two apps were the most common standalone suggestions²: the $13 Pastebot, which Dan Moren uses, and the $30/year Paste, which is also available as part of the SetApp bundle.

I’d need to use both of those apps for a long time in order to write a deeply nuanced comparison. They’re different, each with its advantages, and you should be able to try both for free via one means or another so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Paste has a very visual “shelf” interface that some people will love (and which struck me as overkill), while PasteBot strikes me as being pretty much the platonic ideal of a third-party clipboard app. (Still, I’m sticking with LaunchBar. Muscle memory is powerful.)

Will it happen?

Sometimes, Apple surprises us and releases new macOS features that are legitimately macOS features, not just spin-off features from iOS and iPadOS. But most of the work Apple does these days is building cross-device features. So, while I’d love to discover a future version of macOS with a basic clipboard history built in, I’d like to make a pitch that’s more extensive but might be a better sell inside Apple.

What if… clipboard history for all Apple devices? That’s right, iPad and iPhone too. The interface would be a bit more awkward there, but it’s already awkward and involves meaningful taps and floating menus… so would it be any worse? And then, to wrap it all together, your devices all use iCloud to sync your clipboard histories together so they’re accessible everywhere.

Of course, there are security and privacy issues here—but a lot of those issues were already addressed by Continuity Clipboard. I think they can be overcome if Apple’s sufficiently motivated, and the idea of being able to fish out a link I copied on my Mac a few hours ago on my iPad…. seems pretty great?

Anyway, enough dreaming. If you’re a Mac user, you can benefit from this feature now via a third-party utility, and it might even be one you’re already running! I can’t recommend using a clipboard manager highly enough. Even if all it ever does is spare you from accidentally copying over something important, it’ll be worth it.

By Dan Moren

December 12, 2023 11:03 AM PT

How to stop Mail logs from eating your disk space

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

The other week, I noticed that the amount of free disk space on my MacBook Air had dropped rather precipitously to under a few gigabytes. As I usually don’t store that many files on that machine—much less large ones—I went poking around to figure out what was eating up all my disk space¹.

The culprit, as I reported on Mastodon, turned out to be a Mail log for my iCloud account² that had ballooned to an astonishing 28GB—a not insignificant percentage of my 256GB drive. Popping it open, I scrolled through to see, yes, it was just as I expected, a text file logging data from my mail account. I figured something odd must have happened, deleted the file, and thought nothing more of it.

Fast forward to yesterday, when I went to download the latest macOS Sonoma update on that same machine and discovered that I didn’t have enough space. The straits were not quite as dire as before—I still had 20GB or so available, but not enough for the update to install itself. Despite that, the number seemed low, so I once again went in search of the reason.

And, once again, found that the same Mail log was up to almost 9GB. One time might be a mistake, but two, well, two meant it was time to locate the underlying issue. I popped open the file and took a closer look only to realize that this was logging all of my mail, explaining how the size had gone up so rapidly.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to uncover the source: an Apple discussion thread led me to the Mail app’s Connection Doctor (Window > Connection Doctor), an otherwise handy tool for troubleshooting mail issues. At the bottom of that window is a little check box “Log Connection Activity.” When that’s active (as I perhaps did at some point a few months back while troubleshooting my iCloud problems)³, Mail will start keeping extremely detailed logs, which can quickly reach very large file sizes.

I deactivated the setting and am pleased to report that the logs have been banished, and my disk space is once again my own. But let this be a warning to any who find themselves low on disk space: check those Mail logs, just in case!

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

December 11, 2023 12:03 PM PT

iOS 17.2’s Journal app offers introspection, surface-deep

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

I’ve never really been someone who journals. At various points, I’ve tried: on and off throughout high-school and college, while I studied abroad, during a cross-country roadtrip, but these always seemed to peter out eventually. It’s led me to the conclusion that you’re either someone who can stick with keeping a journal or you’re not.

Though Apple may have great hopes for its new Journal app, I think it unlikely that it will transform the average person into an avid journal-keeper if they aren’t already. And, frankly, if they already are, I’m not sure Apple’s Journal app is going to sway those folks from their current journal of choice.

The Journal app was one of the big marquee announcements of iOS 17 at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but like an increasing number of features announced as part of the company’s big annual software updates, it didn’t arrive with the initial release, instead getting pushed off to a subsequent update: iOS 17.2, which arrives today.

Like so many of Apple’s apps, Journal isn’t a wholly new idea: there are plenty of popular pre-existing journal apps for Apple’s platforms. But to set itself apart, Apple is applying the secret sauce—the fact that it is the platform owner and can leverage data that no third-party developer would ever have access to. That comes in the form of Journaling Suggestions, a machine learning-based feature that can gather all the data your iPhone has about you and try to synthesize it into a prompt for you to write about.

It’s a clever idea, and one that’s clearly meant to ease people into the habit of journaling by answering the age-old question “What do I write about?” But I’m not convinced it’s enough.

Journalist, not journal-er

I’ve been using the Journal app on the iOS 17.2 beta for several weeks now, and despite my best intentions—including not just turning on the notifications that gently remind you to journal, but even keeping the Journal app on my Home Screen—I’ve racked up a grand total of nine journal entries.

As I looked back over the entries that I’d made, I came to the conclusion that Apple has kind of done this feature already—and arguably better—in the Photos app. Journaling Suggestions seem to use the same algorithm that Photo’s Memories do, looking at pictures and videos taken within a certain time period or at a certain location, and grouping them together with a theme. (And, indeed, Memories are even surfaced within the app’s suggestions at times.) But Photos does this automatically¹, presenting memories as a fait accompli for you to revisit, rather than waiting for users to actively go in and manually create them.

Where Journal aims to differentiate itself from Memories is from the ability to bring in other data, such as music or podcasts you listened to, your workouts, and so on. I’m not sure that makes sense to me: Personally, I don’t find those to be things that I’m particularly interested in journaling about, much less revisiting later. Do I really care that on October 30 my wife started listening to Christmas music?²

I did find myself wondering if allowing for more information to be imported might perhaps make the app more compelling. I’m surprised that there’s no integration with HealthKit data beyond the meager ability to see workouts you’ve done, which it summarizes with a static screenshot. Apple’s recent mood-tracking features would seem perfect for a journaling app, but they’re absent here. And, of course, info from third-party apps—say you listen to podcasts in Overcast and not Apple Podcasts—are a non-starter.

A simple journal for a more elegant age

What I do appreciate with Journal purely from a design perspective is its focus on simplicity. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles or hidden features here: when you launch the app, it shows you a reverse chronological list of your journal entries, provides a filter menu so you can see those entries only containing specific types of data (photos, videos, music & podcasts, activity, places, etc.) or those you’ve bookmarked, and has a big honking + button for creating a new entry. That’s about it.

The list view is pretty basic: You can’t really tap on entries, which is a little odd; instead, you tap on items within the entry. That’ll display the item and a little metadata, but there’s not much to do with it at that point. Again, I found myself wondering why I’d choose to go back and view a photo or video in the Journal app rather than in Photos.

Creating a new entry will both recommend events for you to journal about, or show you a list of your most recent events. In some cases this even brings in memories from Photos. There are also what Apple calls “Reflection” prompts that suggest ideas to journal about, but I honestly never found myself inspired to write more. (No small part of which was my reluctance to spend a long time typing out an entry with my thumbs, because I am old and I find that uncomfortable.) However, Apple says that other apps will be able to take advantage of this suggestions framework, which is perhaps the unusual best part of this whole feature: third-party journaling apps, the ones that people have actively bought or downloaded because they’re passionate about journaling, stand to get better.

When you’re composing a journal entry, you can bring in pictures from photos, add your location, take a picture with the camera, or even record an audio clip. There’s also access to journaling suggestions here too, so you can easily get to recent locations you’ve been to or media you’ve consumed.

All by myself

Ultimately, I found myself struck by the solitude of the Journal app. I get it, this is an introspective practice that one is supposed to do for oneself. There’s a reason that the Journal app is locked behind a biometric or passcode authentication. For me, personally, though, a big part of the joy of memories (and the capital ‘m’ Memories from Photos) is sharing them with other people. There’s no export options at all in Journal, no way to share them with anyone else other than to huddle around the same iPhone together. But that’s clearly the result of a deliberate choice Apple has made, and I can respect that decision, even if it’s not for me.

In the end, Journal feels a bit like Apple applied its trademark fixation on privacy to social networking: it’s a social network of one person, for one person. Which is perhaps admirable (and yes, oh-so-very Apple) in an age where we may spend way too much time broadcasting every thought we have. Can the Journal app steal time, attention, mindshare from the routine dopamine hits of the endless scroll? It might not be a bad thing if it did, but I think that the company has an uphill climb ahead of it. We’ll see if it can stay the course or if the Journal app finds itself a casualty of a world that’s moved online.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

December 6, 2023 9:00 AM PT

On macOS, it’s best to start with the default

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

A question from reader Jack B. has led me on a journey of reflection about the result of Apple iterating on macOS for a couple of decades. “I’m hoping for a new MacBook Pro for the holidays,” he wrote. “Do you have any good pieces on Six Colors highlighting the best apps/utilities?”

The short answer is that we don’t, though we have written stories about our favorite apps of the year for most of the last decade. But I thought Jack’s suggestion was interesting, so I opened a file and started writing down my notes about what utilities I simply must install when I start using a new, default Mac.

The thing is, my personal list has been built up over time. It’s a bricolage of utilities that I’ve integrated over the years in order to offset some of the deficiencies of macOS. Sure, we all have specialized tools that we use to do our jobs, and I could list those somewhere, but what Jack was asking was far more general: What are good apps and utilities to augment macOS?

This is when I realized that, over the two decades I’ve been using what was once Mac OS X, Apple has filled in so many of the limitations of macOS that there’s precious little that I would consider a must-have utility today. The early days of OS X were rough. It was a new operating system with a lot of gaps in functionality, and third-party apps rushed in to fill the cracks. But over time, Apple did what it does—adding feature updates here and there that won’t satisfy every need of the power user but will satisfy everyone else.

I got the religion about launcher utilities when my old boss Rick LePage recommended LaunchBar to me (a couple of decades ago!). I was able to turbocharge the speed at which I controlled my Mac by using my fast typing skills, coupled with an intelligent launcher utility. Quicksilver was a similar popular utility back then, and then Alfred came along, and recently Raycast joined the party.

But all the while, since its introduction in 2005, Spotlight has kept getting better, faster, and more versatile. Can it do everything I use LaunchBar to do? Well, no, but it can come pretty close. So close, in fact, that I would hesitate to recommend any of these launcher utilities to someone starting out from scratch. Spotlight’s pretty great. It may be all you need. Start with that, and then, if you want to up your productivity game, bring on LaunchBar, Alfred, or Raycast.

Similarly, while I’m backing up my data eight ways to Sunday, the first step in backing up your Mac is plugging in a big enough hard drive and configuring Time Machine. It’s a great place to start. Yes, you probably want to do an offline backup because if your backup drive is located in the same place as your computer, they can both be destroyed in a fire, flood, or other natural disaster. So your next step might be something like Backblaze. And yes, you might want to go further and use a cloning utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. But Time Machine is, once again, a good start.

I’ve used Dropbox for years and paid for it for most of those years. There are still some Dropbox features that I use that iCloud hasn’t replicated, but that number has shrunk quite a lot in the last few years. iCloud has improved in reliability and added features like shared folders, which means it has more than enough features for most people who are living entirely in Apple’s ecosystem.

My first three installations on a new Mac are usually LaunchBar, Dropbox, and 1Password. But even when it comes to password management, Apple has built up functionality that’s so strong that it’s hard for me to recommend something else. Sure, if you’re sharing passwords with people on other platforms or if you yourself use other platforms, you’ll need more than what Apple offers. But if you’re just trying to generate and store strong passwords, one-time codes, or passkeys, Apple has you covered.

The more I think of it, the more I realize that Apple has identified the most common holes in macOS functionality and has systematically eliminated those holes for the broadest section of its Mac customers. Tools that once filled gaps are now just nice-to-have upgrades from the base Apple functionality.

The biggest gap I can think of that still exists is clipboard history. Many apps can act as clipboard managers—I’ve been using the one in LaunchBar for years, and Pastebot is a popular favorite—and once you use a clipboard manager, it’s hard to go back to Apple’s concept, unchanged in nearly 40 years, that there’s a single clipboard and once you copy something new, the old clipboard is gone forever. I now reflexively copy multiple items in one app and then paste those items into a different app rather than doing the old back-and-forth. I rely on the clipboard history to dig out an item from half an hour ago without having to look it up again.

Not to give Apple new ideas about how to make more utilities sort of obsolete, but imagine if macOS and iOS gave you the ability to access your clipboard history, synced across devices! Wow, that would be amazing—and given how locked down iOS is, it’s a feature that only Apple can provide.

Another area of interest is file management and automation. I recently wrote about how Folder Actions is somehow still a thing in macOS. Think about offering users the ability to select a folder in Finder or Files and build actions that would occur when those folders changed. Folder Actions enabled some of that, and utilities like Hazel have taken it to the extreme. Sure, power users can run wild with features like this, but I think regular users might appreciate being able to say, “When a file in this folder is older than 60 days, file it away somewhere else,” or “Delete all the disk image files in my downloads folder older than 60 days.” There’s something there.

I’m hesitant to suggest that Apple invest even more time in macOS window management given the existence of Spaces and Stage Manager, but Apple hasn’t upgraded the ability of users to move and resize windows within a space. Microsoft has invested a lot in this over on Windows, and there are several popular Mac windowing utilities such as Moom out there. It might be worth it for Apple to make it easier for users to quickly tile windows in order to tidy up their screens.

This is why I struggle with Jack’s question. For basic use, macOS is pretty solid and comes with a bunch of useful apps right out of the box, too. Sure, there are lots of great nerdy utilities you can use to spiff things up—I love SwiftBar, for example. And I still need a load of stuff specifically to do my job, like BBEdit and Logic Pro and Audio Hijack, and the list goes on.

But the truth is, unless you’re a longtime Mac user who has integrated your personal collection of utilities into the way you use your Mac, you might not need all that much. So that’s my advice for people getting new Macs who don’t carry that legacy with them: Start with what’s there and then explore when you find where the built-in tools can’t meet your needs.

Except a clipboard manager. You should totally use one of those. It’ll change your life.