Search, pin and tag: getting more out of a local clipboard history

I already wrote about why Clipboard History keeps everything on your device. This post is the practical half: how I actually use it during a day of work, with search, pins and tags.

A quick reminder of what it captures. It saves text you copy or cut in Chrome tabs where you turned capture on, including the copy buttons on pages such as a GitHub code block. It does not see other apps on your computer, and it never saves password fields, card details or one time codes.

Open it without the mouse

Press Ctrl+Shift+Y (Cmd+Shift+Y on a Mac) and the history opens. If that shortcut clashes with something else, change it at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. Click any clip and it is back on your clipboard; a small "Copied" label confirms it.

Search finds more than the text

The search box looks in three places: the clip text, the site it came from, and its tags. That second one is more useful than it sounds. I rarely remember what exactly I copied, but I usually remember where. Typing github or docs.google narrows the list to everything copied on that site.

Search ignores case. While a search or tag filter is on, the footer shows how many clips match, for example "3 of 7 clips", and pinned matches always come first. If nothing matches, the popup repeats your search and reminds you where it looks.

Pin what you paste every day

Some text you copy once and some you paste twenty times a week: a shipping address, a standard reply, a command you never remember, an IBAN for invoices. Pin those. Pinned clips sit on their own green panel above the recent ones.

Pins also survive cleanup. History keeps 500 clips by default (you can set anything from 10 to 5,000 in Options), and when it is full the oldest unpinned clips go first. Pinned clips are never removed that way, and "Clear unpinned" at the bottom of the popup wipes everything else while keeping them.

You do not have to copy something from a page to pin it. "Add clip" at the top lets you type or paste text by hand; those clips are marked "by hand" so you can tell them apart.

Tags for groups of clips

Every clip has a small "+ tag" field. Type a name and press Enter. Tags are stored in lower case and spaces become hyphens, so "Client A" and "client a" end up as the same client-a tag. A clip can have up to 10 tags.

Every tag you use appears as a filter button above the list, next to "All". Click a tag to show only those clips, click it again to go back. Combined with search, this gets very specific: the invoices tag plus the word 2026 shows only this year's invoice snippets.

The tags I find useful are about jobs, not topics: one per client, one for replies I send often, one for sql snippets, one for addresses. Remove a tag with the small x on its label.

Back up and move

Options has Export JSON and Import JSON. Export saves your whole history, tags and pins included, as a plain JSON file. Import adds clips from an earlier export and skips the ones you already have, so you can bring history from a second computer without making duplicates. Nothing syncs on its own; moving data is always your action with a file you can read.

Keep some sites out

If there is a site whose text you never want in history, add it to excluded domains in Options. For a short stretch of work, use Pause capture instead; the popup shows that capture is paused and has a Resume capture link, so you do not forget to turn it back on.

Clipboard History is free on the Chrome Web Store, and its page here lists what it never saves, what each permission is for, and every release. If there is a workflow it makes awkward, tell me at info@pankovs.com.