Copy and paste is essential to life. Either copying text from Wikipedia and pasting it in your research paper or copying lines of text from Office documents and merging them in a different document. If you work with text, copy and paste is a part of your daily routine, and sometimes, your life hangs in the balance of a clipboard entry.

Which is why you should give it more power. What if you could recall the last 100 things you copied with the press of a button? Paste in the 9th last thing you copied just like that? Create snippets and instantly enter them into a text field?

It’s easy. Try some of the utilities listed below.

1. Pasteomatic

Pasteomatic is not a clipboard manager but a snippet manager with links to the clipboard. Download the app and add your most used snippets in there and keep it running in the background.

Put the cursor in the text box and use the global hotkey to bring up a popup menu listing all your snippets. From here you can search through to look up something specific or select a snippet from the list, press enter and it will be pasted in the text box just like that.

2. ClipMenu

ClipMenu is a freeware clipboard manager for Mac. The latest version 1.0 is ready for Yosemite but is in alpha stage. I tested it and so far it’s been reliable but the alpha tag means that someday it might not be.

But for a freeware, ClipMenu is certainly worth trying out. The pitch is simple, using the global hotkey you can bring up a menu that lists your five latest clipboard entries and shows 20 more via a menu. You can use Cmd + 1 to Cmd + 0 to copy one of the last 10 clipboard items back to the current clipboard. You can get to the menu using the menu bar utility as well (which also supports Yosemite’s Dark mode).

If you click the History Window option you’ll get to see the last 100 entries. You can increase this count from the preferences window.

One cool feature ClipMenu has is preview bubbles. So you can preview the entire text or the image from the clipboard before pasting it somewhere.

3. CopyClip 2

CopyClip 2 costs $4.99 from outside the Mac App Store and comes with a 10 day trial. It’s the most powerful clipboard utility here and if you take your clipboard seriously, it will be worth the asking price.

CopyClip 2 is the natural evolution of CopyClip, the app that’s still available in the App Store (as a free, ad supported app). It brings an updated UI that goes well with Yosemite and tries to make pasting stuff from far back in your clipboard history as fast as possible.

CopyClip can record your 230 latest clips. You can ask it to stop recording from the menu bar utility. It has another setting that I really like. You can block CopyClip from recording on specific apps as well.

I really like the CopyClip popup that you can bring up using the global hotkey. It has two themes, light and dark. It has a search feature and lists 10 clipboard entries on one page (the Cmd + N key to quickly copy the text works here as well).

You can use the left and right arrow keys to navigate the pages. This, combined with the Cmd + N shortcut and the search feature makes CopyClip the fastest way to restore clipboard text, which is the whole point of clipboard utilities really.

The Winner: CopyClip 2

The $4.99 asking price might seem too steep for a clipboard utility but with CopyClip, you’re getting your money’s worth.

If free is all you can do and you can live with less features, try giving the alpha version of ClipMenu a try.

Taking the clipboard cross-platform: Learn how you can use Pushbullet to automatically sync your clipboard between desktop and Android (even Mac) and check out two feature rich clipboard managers for Android.

How do you make your work related clipboard management easier? Do you use keyboard launchers? Text expanders? Or a custom workflow? Let us know in the comments below.