I’ve been using the clipboard history feature of Alfred for a long time. It lets you search and sort through everything you’ve copied before and paste it.
It’s such a useful feature that it became an essential part of my daily workflow. I still find it lacking in some scenarios though:
- Update: Text cannot be edited/fixed after it’s copied
- Saving: It’s not easy to save text for later. Alfred supports saving a clipboard item as a snippet, but it’s done through a dialog with a couple of settings, which for me is a bit too much.
- Search: While history can be set to unlimited, my clipboard history tend to clutter up with a lot of single-use items. Then it’s hard find the one item that I deemed important a while ago.
To address these concerns, I’ve started copying and pasting important pieces of text into a folder called Log in Notes. Then when I need to find something from earlier, I just search the Log folder for it. It’s a simple system but it works great!
To make this process more convenient, I’ve created a simple Alfred workflow that let’s me add a new note to the Log folder with a global shortcut.
As Alfred was using CMD+Shift+V for the clipboard history, I thought it fitting to use CMD+Shift+C for the clipboard-saving action.
Now, whenever I stumble upon something important, I just highlight it, hit the shortcut, and it’s instantly saved in Notes; I can pin it, edit it, and search for it later conveniently.
Download
You can find out more on how the workflow works and grab the latest version on GitHub.