A Built-in Secondary Clipboard on MacOS

I’ll get straight to the point: you know how on a Mac you can do ⌘X, ⌘C, and ⌘V to cut, copy, and paste? You can also do ⌃K and ⌃Y (that’s the control button) to cut and paste something else without interfering with what you had stored in that primary clipboard! Go ahead, try it in this text box if you’re on a Mac:

1. Cut or copy this line using ⌘X or ⌘C 2. Cut this line using ⌃K 3. Paste line 1 below using ⌘V: 4. Paste line 2 below using ⌃Y:

No option for a secondary copy without cutting? It seems not, I don’t know why. Also, the clipboard seems to be per-program — no pasting between a browser and a text editor — it doesn’t work in certain programs, and it seems to only work with editable text.

Still, this can be very handy in certain cases. Suppose you’re trying to buy a bookcase on Craigslist and you want to send a slightly personalized email to many candidate sellers. You can do something like this:

1. Draft a generic version of the email and put it on your secondary clipboard with ⌃K.
2. For each potential seller:
   1. Copy ⌘C and paste ⌘V their email address into your mail program using the primary clipboard.
   2. Your generic email is still on your secondary clipboard; paste it from there with ⌃Y, make the necessary personalizations, and send.

There are third-party “clipboard managers” that aim to extend the clipboard’s functionality even more, but I think it’s cool that for those times when you need just a bit more than the standard copy and paste, a built-in feature has you covered.

(It’s a great bookcase.)