Cut and Copy Fast and Easy with PopClip for macOS

Introduction

Everyone has little tools they find useful, tools that make using their computers easier. Often they are time savers, even ones that only save a second or two will add up over time.

I thought I’d spend a few posts talking about some of my favorites. In this first post we’ll talk about a tool to make cutting and copying text into the clipboard fast and easy on an Apple Mac – PopClip.

PopClip for macOS

Cut and / or Copy of text is something we all do a thousand times a day. Even though it’s fast action, anything we can do to make it even faster adds up by the end of the day.

On the Apple Mac, I found PopClip to be a fantastic tool. It’s available in Apple’s App store, for the reasonable cost of $12.99.

So how does it work? Well it’s pretty simple. Start by highlighting text, here I’ve opened the basic text editor on my MacBook and highlighted part of a sentence.

When you highlight text, you will see a little toolbar automatically appears or “pops up”, without having to right click or take any other action.

Here PopClip is giving us the option of cutting and copying the text. I also happened to have something in the clipboard, so the option to paste that in also appears.

The magnifying glass will launch our default browser and use your default search engine and do a search on the selected text.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to the standard cut / copy / paste, PopClip offers a vast array of extensions. In the following screen shot, I’ve added the braces extension.

With the braces extension added, you can now see additional options added to PopClip’s bar. For this shot, instead of clicking copy I’ll be clicking on the Square Brackets button.

This will copy the the text into my clipboard, adding brackets around it. Then when I paste it, the pasted text now is surrounded by brackets as you can see above.

The braces are just one of over a hundred extensions available to you with PopClip.

Conclusion

I realize it may seem simple, but once you try it you will be amazed at how much nicer cut and copy becomes on your Mac. In addition the vast array of extensions will make other operations you frequently do, such as surrounding text with braces, fast.

In the next post we’ll look at a similar tool for Windows, then over the next few posts highlight some other tools I find very useful in my daily life.