The copy/paste function was one of the truly revolutionary advances of personal computing, and the internet has only made it more useful. But the "clipboard," the digital holding area where copied data is saved for future pasting, is limited to a single image or continuous piece of text on standard operating systems.

That single-slot clipboard is constantly overwritten, meaning that users often have to find and copy the same source text repeatedly. Paste, available through Setapp, changes all that by creating a dynamic, expansive snippet manager that lets you save and organize text, images, links, snippets of code, and even screenshots to different "pinboards."

Used to its full capacity, Paste can vastly improve your productivity, but it offers real advantages to even casual users. Let's take a look at how to get the most out of its features.

Accessing your Paste pinboards

Once you've installed Paste, you can call up your Pinboard Manager at any time by selecting the P icon on your menu bar or using the shortcut (command+shift+V).

The Pinboard manager occupies the bottom third of your screen so that you can easily toggle between Paste and whatever you're working on. You can dismiss the pinboard manager by clicking anywhere outside of it or pressing Esc.

Copying multiple items at once

Once Paste is running, anything you copy using (command+c), (command+x), or a drop-down menu will be automatically saved to the Pinboard Manager in the order in which you copied it.

Paste will detect the type of media you have copied, identifying it for your convenience. The app also includes an optional sound cue to let you know that an item has been successfully added to the Pinboard Manager without you having to open it.

Making multiple pinboard lists

While you can scroll left and right in the Pinboard Manager with the arrow keys, this is less useful when you have dozens or hundreds of items copied.

To get the most of your Paste experience, it's worth your time to organize the items you copy using multiple pinboards. Pinboards can be created, renamed, color-coded, and deleted as needed. Simply drag and drop copied items to assign them to a pinboard.

Searching your pinboards

If you ever need to revisit an item and you can't remember which pinboard it's on, you can easily search all your copied items by keyword using the search bar.

Pasting

Pasting from your pinboards to a document, text field, or command line is easy. First, make sure that you've clicked into the field where you want to paste. Next, open Paste with your keyboard shortcut and select the item you'd like to insert, and either click it or highlight it using the arrow keys and press (return). You can also drag and drop items from the pinboard manager.

If you've copied text with unnecessary formatting that you'd like to remove, you can command-click that item and select "paste as Plain Text."

Adjusting preferences

As you work with Paste, you may find that you want to tweak some of its settings or set new keyboard shortcuts. To do this, simply click the Paste icon on the menu bar and select "Preferences," then adjust the settings to your satisfaction.

The more you save with Paste, the more useful it becomes. Soon you'll have an extensive, searchable library of copied text, links, code snippets, and images, ready to drop into whatever you're working on.

Plus, Paste's built-in sharing feature lets you send what you've copied to friends and family right from the toolbar manager. Pass it along!