How do you access clipboard history in MacOS

Question

I am using MacOS Yosemite (10.10.5).

All the questions I find about clipboard history in StackExchange suggest that you have to install a third party app to acquire this feature. But when I use the TextMate editor I go into the Edit->Paste entry and it gives me a Show History entry. I look at the resulting list and it contains all my copy history from all applications.

Is it possible I installed something to achieve this? I have gone through my homebrew list and can't find anything that looks like it.

Since all applications seem to be contributing to this list how would other applications paste from the list?

Solution

My old answer to this was wrong. MacOS doesn't maintain clipboard history from what I can tell. For me, TextMate had been running for some time and while it was running it was gathering everything that was being pasted from whatever application. Presumably the 3rd party apps do the same thing. I installed clipy and it is on github so you can learn about it there if you know XCode/Swift. I don't.

So the answer is: you do have to install a 3rd party app and the one I installed was TextMate.

Comments

[gronostaj]

Most likely TextMate is tracking clipboard history itself.

[albe]

But it is getting all the copies from all applications like terminal and the browser.

[gronostaj]

If dedicated clipboard managers can do it, why wouldn't TextMate be able to?

[albe]

Right, I guess the question is why don't Firefox and Terminal do it, but I think that's not so hard to answer.

[gronostaj]

It's common for developers to copy stuff from other programs and paste into their code. A clipboard history just makes sense in a text editor. In a browser, not so much.