ClipBuddy 2.0

ClipBuddy is a system clipboard aggregator, editor and organizer that can be used to collect clippings of all kinds infinitely, to be retrieved, edited, and/or searched at will. ClipBuddy operates in the background, so the standard systemwide copy and paste commands add to it; the program also has customizable hotkeys. Clips collected have metadata they can be sorted on, including date, size, source application, and source URL if applicable.

Other features include clip uniting, text formatting, automatic backups, syncing over Dropbox, and "SuperPaste," which allows the user to obtain customized variable results each time they paste.

As expected from a powerful program, the learning curve is steep. I never quite figured out how to get SuperPaste to work. But I couldn't think of any situation I would need it for anyway. That's the thing you have to ask yourself: Is it really worth figuring out the program in the first place? Even if you do have a need for such a powerful clipboard, you never quite know when things will stop working like you planned. Creating a sibling node (i.e. clipping container) for search results causes the program to crash, for example, despite the developers' reassurance that they "fixed the bug that causes the program to quit unexpectedly" (as if only one such bug could ever exist).

Although I didn't use this program enough to reach this result, my experience with clipboard managers in general has been that they bog down the system speed significantly after a time with RAM consumption. ClipBuddy does ease this nuisance with its search function, which can cull out the particularly big or old clippings. Still, if there's data you want to hold on to for a long time, it seems to me that there are much better places than the clipboard - no matter how nicely you can organize it.