r/macapps • u/FlowIll9219 • 16h ago

Lifetime PastePlop: a clipboard manager in a grid with saved categories, floating snippets, OCR, multipaste, and a free iPhone companion

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Disclosure: I'm the developer. PastePlop is on the Mac App Store under a paid developer account, so I believe this is Tier 1.

Problem

Clipboard managers are a solved problem. Nothing in PastePlop is a new idea, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Every single feature below already exists in some other app.

My problem was that the features I wanted were scattered across several of them. One had the grid but not the categories. One had OCR but a cramped interface. Another had a menu bar accessory but no way to park a snippet on screen. So I built the one that has all of them with the UI, keyboard control, and details I wanted.

  • A resizable grid, not a list. ⌘⇧V zooms a translucent grid over whatever you're in. A slider scales tiles from compact to comfortable.
  • Saved categories. Drag a tile into a bucket for snippets, prompts, signatures, brand colors. ⌘1 is History, ⌘2 through ⌘9 are your categories.
  • A floating palette (MiniPlop). An always on top tray of the clips you reach for constantly. It can also sit inline in the overlay, or drop down from the menu bar.
  • Floating images and text snippets. Right click any tile and Float pops it into its own borderless resizable window. Two finger scroll fades it to 25% so a reference screenshot can sit over your work without blocking it.
  • Multi-paste. Select several tiles, ⌘↩ pastes them all in sequence.
  • Reverse paste. Same selection, pasted bottom to top. Useful more often than it sounds.
  • Paste in whatever order you want. Tiles drag to reorder inside History, inside a category and inside MiniPlop, so you arrange the sequence first and then multi-paste it. You can also join a selection with a comma, comma plus space, or paragraph break instead of pasting them separately.
  • OCR search. Screenshots are OCR'd locally with Vision, so searching a phrase you remember seeing finds the screenshot it was in. On device, no network, no key.
  • OCR paste. Right click a screenshot and Paste as Text drops the recognized text instead of the image.
  • Menu bar accessory. Left click for recent items or a custom list, right click for the standard menu. Or hide the icon entirely and live on the hotkey.
  • A free iPhone and iPad companion. Turn sync on and your recent clips and your saved categories mirror through your own private iCloud database to a free companion app. Tap a tile to put it on your phone's clipboard. Search works there too, including the OCR text from screenshots. Off by default, and you pick what travels: text, images, categories, and recognized text in images are four separate switches.

Plus the usual: text, rich text, images, animated GIFs, files, and links with previews, hex colors as swatches, drag out to any app, drop onto Finder to get a real file, Pause Capturing and an ignored apps list for password managers.

Comparison

vs. Paste. Paste is very polished, and it still beats me on sync: it syncs between Macs, it's two way, and its iPhone app can capture what you copy on the phone. Where I think PastePlop wins is the overall feature set and UI and the price model. You get a scalable grid instead of a horizontal shelf, floating snippet windows you can park over your work, OCR search and OCR paste, reverse and joined multi-paste, and a one time price instead of a subscription.

vs. Maccy. Maccy is free, open source, and genuinely good at what it does, which is a fast keyboard list of recent text. If that's your whole need, use Maccy and keep your money. PastePlop is aimed at the case where your clipboard is full of screenshots and files rather than lines of text, and where you want to keep things permanently rather than just scroll back.

Version Differences

The Mac App Store build cannot paste for you. It's sandboxed, so it can't synthesize ⌘V into another app. Picking a tile copies it and you press ⌘V yourself. That also means no multi-paste and no reverse paste in the store build, though it can concatenate multiple items. The direct download and Setapp builds do the real paste, and they ask for Accessibility permission once in order to do it. Everything else (categories, MiniPlop, floats, search, OCR, drag and drop) is identical across all three. If multi-paste is why you're here, buy direct, not from the store.

Pricing & Availability

11 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

4

u/iamthekiller 7h ago

Jesus Christ.

1

u/Open-Appeal-9747 6h ago

The mobile companion is the nice part, I love to make my iPad and Mac coexist, not mirror like most apps do. So to be able to search and copy from iPad without taking the focus in the Mac screen is ideal, than just paste it via the Apple echo system. Nice done . And great ui

1

u/FlowIll9219 6h ago

Thanks!

1

u/alreadytherenow 6h ago

i dropped Paste when i saw the $99 pricetag, so the one time price here is what got my attention

does it skip password managers on its own or do you have to add them to the ignored list yourself?

2

u/FlowIll9219 6h ago

It doesn't automatically add any apps to the ignore list. Is that an important feature to you?

1

u/alreadytherenow 6h ago

kinda yeah, it's the one setting i'd forget about until a password shows up in my history

most password managers tag what they copy with org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType, so if PastePlop just skipped anything with that tag you wouldn't need a list at all. i think Maccy does it that way

2

u/FlowIll9219 6h ago

Thanks, I'll add that to the app onboarding.

1

u/shash747 3h ago

Pretty cool!

1

u/llqoli 53m ago

Does OCR search handle Traditional Chinese mixed with English in the same screenshot? I keep UI references with labels in both languages, so finding one from either phrase would be handy.

1

u/Dev_in_Training_BTW 2m left

Skipping anything tagged org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType is worth a code change rather than an onboarding note. The people who would be hurt by a password sitting in a searchable grid are exactly the ones who will never open an ignore list, so honouring the tag means nobody has to know the setting exists. I'm an IT admin by day, and a clipboard manager that keeps work credentials in plain text is the sort of thing that gets blocked on managed Macs, so it also decides whether the app is allowed on work machines at all.

0

u/artginzburg 5h ago

I guess this is what I would show my AI as the anti-etalon

But I'm curious whether the conversion is enough to pay for clicks on google ads