The new Spotlight is easily my favorite macOS announcement from WWDC25. It may even be my favorite update across all of Apple’s platforms this year. Still, I don’t plan on abandoning my current clipboard manager. Here’s why.
The addition of a native clipboard history tool to macOS feels like one of those small but meaningful quality-of-life upgrades we’ve been waiting forever to get.
That said… I’m not switching.
Don’t get me wrong: I love that Apple is acknowledging clipboard history as a power-user feature that’s ready for casual-user adoption. But for me, the new Spotlight clipboard just doesn’t go far enough.
And honestly, it probably shouldn’t.
Unlimited history
Granted, we’re still on Developer beta 1. But as it’s planned right now, Apple’s new clipboard history only goes back eight hours.
By comparison, my current clipboard manager, Keyboard Maestro’s Clipboard History Switcher, keeps a searchable archive of up to hundreds of clips (default is 200, but you can adjust that). It takes me a few seconds to look up at things I copied days or sometimes even more than a week ago.
I’ve lost count of how many times that’s saved my bacon from redoing work, rewriting text, or hunting down lost links, images, and even files. Once I copy something, I know it’ll be there for as long as I need it. And thanks to Apple’s Universal Clipboard, that goes for stuff I copy on my iPhone, too.
And then there’s the feature set. With Keyboard Maestro, I can:
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