Clipboard history manager is on the way for Chromebooks

Out of the box, Chromebooks obviously support cut, copy and paste the way you would expect and they have for years. One big limitation of this functionality that has been present just as long, however, is the lack of any sort of management for these clipboard items. Cut something and you’d better remember to paste it right away or risk losing that string of text forever. It’s a tad anxiety-inducing if I’m honest and I, for one, would really love the ability to have a bit of a trailing history of these clipboard actions the way that Window allows.

From what 9to5 Google has found, it seems that functionality is being worked on for Chrome OS, too. At this point, it looks like we may be only talking about a 5 item history, but that limit could change based on device or internal hardware once this feature actually rolls out. Right now, according to this commit in the Chromium Repositories, Multipaste is the name of this new feature and it will be able to handle a history of clipboard items spanning text, formatted text, images, bookmark format web links, and web smart paste.

We’re a bit unclear on what that last one is at this point, but it could be connected to Chrome’s current WIP ability to share copied items across devices. There will also be an accompanying flag for the feature that gives us a bit more insight on how all this will work:

Enable Multipaste

Pressing search + v will show a menu that allows you to paste things previously copied.

#multipaste

Finally, it appears that a system tray button will be added for this feature as well. Looking at an older commit from the same developer, a button for a feature being internally referred to as ‘tote’ has been in the works since early May that revolves around the clipboard, so it is reasonable to expect that ‘tote’ has something to do with the Multipaste functionality we’re seeing. Putting those things together, we should expect some sort of system tray button or widget to handle this clipboard history for users.

As it stands right now, this feature could still be a few versions of Chrome away from launching. In the meantime, there are ways to access a clipboard history by way of extensions, but it is understandable that many of us are a bit wary about installing extensions that we don’t absolutely need thanks to their ongoing issues with data protection and privacy. If you want to try one out that looks to be secure and legit, we’d recommend Clipboard History Pro with it’s 70,000+ users and nearly 5-star average review. It is fully-featured and, honestly, will do far more than this built-in feature will when or if it does see the light of day. If you are interested in this extension, we’ll be doing a quick review of it soon.

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