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Clipboard history

The system clipboard remembers one thing. QlipLab remembers everything you copy and hands it back whenever you need it.

Capture

QlipLab watches the clipboard and captures each new item the moment you copy it — text, rich text (HTML), and images. Capture is event-driven, not polled, so it’s immediate and cheap.

A few limits keep it sensible: text and images up to 5 MB, rich-text HTML up to 1 MB. Bigger clips are still captured as plain text.

Each item records what it is — its detected format — and, where the platform allows, which application it came from.

Search and pin

  • Search filters the history by content as you type.
  • Pin the clips you keep reaching for; pinned items sort to the top and survive “clear history.”
  • Quick-paste the top items with Cmd/Ctrl+1…9 — see Keyboard shortcuts.

Paste back where you were

Click a clip (or press Enter) and QlipLab does the thing every clipboard manager should: it hides itself, returns focus to the app you were in, and pastes there — the way Ditto does on Windows, on all three platforms. On macOS this is what the Accessibility permission is for.

Sensitive clips are handled quietly

When you copy something that looks sensitive — a password, an API key, a credit-card number — QlipLab flags it and blurs it in the list until you hover, so a shoulder-surfer or a screen-share doesn’t catch it. What counts as sensitive is covered in Format detection, and you can turn the detection off in Settings.

Housekeeping

Settings give you control over how much history sticks around:

SettingWhat it doesDefault
History limitHow many items to keep100
ExpirationAuto-remove clips older than N days (7 / 14 / 30 / 90, or never)Never
Store imagesCapture image clips, not just textOn
Clear on quitWipe unpinned history when you quitOff
Ignored appsNever capture clips copied from these apps (password managers, etc.)

Everything lives in a local database in QlipLab’s own data directory. Nothing about your history leaves the machine — see Privacy.