To some, just the idea of a clipboard manager for their Android phone might sound preposterous. On your main computer, where you spend eight hours a day working and jumping between apps, a clipboard manager just makes sense. You copy a lot of stuff between documents or browser tabs, and it helps a lot if there’s a bucket that holds everything you’ve saved in the past week. It can be – and I’m not exaggerating here – life-saving. Or at least time-saving.
On your Android phone, the same things apply – maybe on a smaller scale. But think about it, nowadays you use your phone for all sorts of work stuff, and it’s not just limited to communication.
For the last month or so I’ve been using Clip Stack as my clipboard manager on my OnePlus One, and mostly it has been a passive affair. I think that’s the way to go. Clip Stack works in the background, saving everything I copy, silently. And I just drop in whenever I need something (via the handy sticky notification).
Here’s how it can help you as well.
What Is Clip Stack
Clip Stack is a clipboard manager. Once it is set up, any text you copy from anywhere in the OS will be saved in Clip Stack’s memory. By default, Clip Stack has no limits, but you can set it to only record entries from the previous week or last thirty days if you want.
Clip Stack is loaded with features (but you should select the few you want to interact with and let go of the rest).
- You can star items from the app and access just the starred items using the toggle in the app’s toolbar or the notification widget.
- You can enable an always-on floating menu (like Facebook Chat heads). Not a good idea. Do you really want an “always there” access for your clipboard?
- The sticky notification I told you about is really useful. But by default, it sometimes shows up at weird times (probably a bug). Turning on “Pin Notification” and setting the “Priority” to “Low” makes things a lot better.
How You Should Be Using Clip Stack
As I said, passively. Clip Stack will automatically store anything that’s copied. So that part is taken care of.
You just have to go in to retrieve something you saved previously, and copy it to the clipboard again.
To do that you can either launch the app or use the sticky notification. You should use the latter.
When you swipe down the notification drawer, you’ll see a normal notification with the latest clipboard entry. The awesomeness comes in when you expand the notification by swiping down on it.
Now, you’ll see the last fI’ve clipboard entries and a button to quickly copy any of the entries to the current clipboard right there. If that’s not enough, tapping the “Star” icon switches to just the starred entries.
Let me emphasize the importance of this feature. Just by swiping down you can quickly copy anything from the last five entries. But if you “Star” some important clipboard entries that you know you use frequently, they’re also available at a press of a button.
Surprising Little Use Case: Quickly Adding Text
As a person with questionable memory, I’m always looking for ways to quickly offload notes from my head. Apps like Evernote are really useful for this.
But there are things I don’t want to put into Evernote. Things that are only relevant for a couple of minutes or hours, like the route I’m supposed to take or train seat numbers.
For such things I can expand the Clip Stack widget by tapping the “Click to add text” box, writing something down and saving it.
Now it will be visible at the top of the Clip Stack widget which means it’s easy to get to and it’s in my clipboard – an added bonus.
The Art of Managing Clipboard
Are you sold on clipboard managers for Android yet? Do you use them on your PC/Mac? I like the clipboard manager that comes with Alfred, my go to keyboard launcher on Mac. What about you? Share with us in the comments below.
Khamosh Pathak is a freelance technology writer. He’s always trying out new apps, tools and services. He is platform agnostic. You’ll find an iPhone 5 and a OnePlus One on him at (almost) all times.
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