Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's a brief introduction to ClipTools.

So ClipTools is a utility app that you can get for your Mac in the Apple Mac App Store.

You can find it by searching for ClipTools. It's available worldwide and it is completely free.

There aren't even any in-app purchases or ads. Once you install it, you'll find it here in the

Menu Bar. It's a Menu Bar app. So the only place it exists is up here. There won't be any kind of

window or introduction screen that opens up. It just appears here at the top. If you don't see

it, keep in mind that you have limited space here on the right side of your Menu Bar. Even if you

show some empty space here, the Mac limits how many items can fit here. So if you don't see it,

even though ClipTools is running, you may need to use Command-drag to remove some items that you don't really need up here.

For instance, these items I'm removing are easily available here in Control Center, so I've made a little more room so ClipTools can fit.

Now, at its most basic, ClipTools is a Clipboard Manager. So if I were to select some text and

then I can look at ClipTools and see the last item that I copied here at the top. But the whole idea is it saves more than just one. So,

if I were to select some more text and use Command-C to copy, I can see now I've got that

here at the top, but I also have the previous one. Normally with the Clipboard, you can only

Paste what you copied last. But with ClipTools or other clipboard managers, you can select something

that you previously copied and have it pasted in. So I'll copy a third thing here, and I'll

see there are three items. If I want to paste the previous one, not the current one that is

in the clipboard, I can simply select it, and you can see how it pastes in there.

In addition to just being able to paste, you can do a variety of different things using modifiers. For

instance, using Control and Shift will paste plain text. In other words, it will remove any formatting. So

if you copied something from a webpage and it is in a certain font, maybe color, maybe style,

you can use this to paste it as plain text. If you want to remove something from the

list, you can use Shift and Option. That allows you to remove the item. Now, you find out about all this stuff by

going to the Help page for ClipTools. Just go to macmost.com/cliptools. You'll find everything you

need to know here. So, for instance, for handling

clips, you can read about all of the modifier keys that you can use. You can do a variety

of different things, including even hiding clips so you don't see them when you choose the menu.

You can also group paste. So you can copy, say, three items and then paste all three of them at

once. You can read about all these different features by going through the guide on this page. You can always access it in ClipTools

itself by going to Instructions & Feedback.

Now, when this list here gets too long, let's copy a bunch of other things here,

You can see there's not enough room for all of that. But a submenu, "More Clips," appears.

So this keeps everything kind of neat and tidy. You see the top three here,

but you also see more under "More Clips." You can always customize this and lots of things about

ClipTools by going to Settings. In Settings, I can set the total number of clips for it to remember

but also the number that are shown in the Main Menu before needing to use the "More Clips" Menu.

You can also save clips. So let's go to one of these clips, like this one here. If I hold Option, you can see it changes to "Save." Once I use that,

once I'll have another submenu called "Saved Clips." I can save as many clips as I want. That will stay there permanently.

They won't drop off the bottom as I copy more.

But the whole idea of ClipTools is to add a variety of different tools in addition to a

Clipboard Manager. So, for instance, the next items down are "Paste Date" and "Paste Time." So if I use

"Paste Date," you can see here it pastes today's date. The format, though, is decided in Settings.

You go to Settings here; you can select a Date Format and also for the next item, "Paste Time."

You can specify exactly how that looks. You can go to the ClipTools webpage to see how to use the

various different characters here represent parts of the date and time and to find it like you want.

The next item is "Paste Lorem Ipsum." This is sample text that is used maybe to fill

up a document while you're arranging it and to act as a placeholder for the text you'll eventually put in that box. So you can use a

a variety of different options here to add sample text like this to your document. Next, we have what is probably the most powerful part of ClipTools, which are Smart Clips.

Smart Clips allow you to have clips that have little commands in them that do various things. So let's add a new one here. You just type your Smart Clip in here. It could just be

plain text like a normal clip. But with certain commands, you can do things. Like, for instance,

the Pick command allows you to choose from several different items. In this case, three.

The Date command allows you to insert a date in a format. In this case, just the day of the

week. You can even add or subtract a number of seconds from the current time to get that

result. The rest is just regular text here. So I'm going to add this, and now when I select this

Smart Clip here, it will first prompt me for one of those items, and I can select one. Then the other

part is to include the day, but two days from now. So you can see I'm recording this on a Wednesday,

and it puts Friday there. To see everything you can do in Smart Clips, go to the webpage. So you

have the ability to select one of the previously copied clips; you can ask for something;

you can have a random item put into a spot of the text; you can use the current selection; you

can replace text from the selection; you can add lorem ipsum text; you can add all sorts of special

actions and change case and do calculations and all sorts of things in Smart Clips. There is a ton of different stuff you can do.

Note that you also have Smart Files. Smart Files work just like Smart Clips, but they allow you to put the clips as little text files in some folder you choose. So you can edit them in a text editor of your choice.

By the way, if you find these videos or ClipTools useful, you can join the more than 2,000 others that support them at Patreon. You get exclusive content,

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Now, another thing that ClipTools can do is calculations. So you can choose to paste a calculation here, and then it prompts you to enter in a calculation. Like that.

I'll press return, and you can see it pastes the answer there. You could also select something,

like this, select it like that, and go to Calculate Selection. It will replace the selection there with the results. You can look through a list of previous calculations to paste

them in. You can also change a setting so that it actually pastes the expression as

well as the result. There is even the ability to use Stacks, which allow you to copy several

different numbers and then do things like paste the sum or the average of all of those numbers.

Now, with text selected, there is a variety of things you can do in here. You can get selection

statistics, like that, but you can also go and change case. So you can make everything uppercase,

everything lowercase, you can capitalize every word, or every sentence. You can even choose Headline Case, which will try to make a title out

of it. So some words are capitalized and others are lowercase. In Settings, you can determine which

ones. You can even do fun things like alternate

case, random case, or switch to characters that make it look like the text is upside down. So

here I'll choose Capitalize All Words, and you can see how it does that for this selection.

There's also a bunch of selection actions right here. So you can do things like strip HTML tags.

You can do URL encoding and decoding.  Different things for programmers. You can sort lines. If you've

got a bunch of different lines, you can sort them alphabetically with this. A key one here

is converting numbers to words. So, if you've got a number like this, you can select it,

go to Selection Actions, choose this, and you can see how it converts it to words. Now let's talk about keyboard shortcuts. You may

notice a lot of different keyboard shortcuts here.

But they don't work by themselves. For instance, Shift-Command-D pastes the date. But if I try to

use Shift-Command-D here, it doesn't work. You have to have the Menu chosen first. Then you

can use Shift-Command-D. Now it may seem like that is not very useful except that

in Settings you can set up a Global Keyboard Shortcut and set it to activate the Menu. So

here I've set up Shift-Command-M. So now all I need to do is Shift-Command-M to activate the

Menu, and I can use the arrow keys to go down and return to select something. But a quick

Shift-Command-D will actually paste the date because that's the keyboard shortcut here. Another big part of ClipTools is the Clip Manager.

So go down to here, and this brings up this

window. You can look at Clips, your Saved Clips, and your Smart Clips. This is a really easy way

to look through them. You can remove some or save them in Smart Clips. You can add them. You can

ClipManager also allows you to set a keyboard shortcut for any Smart Clip.

So since you can do almost anything in Smart Clips that you can do in the rest of ClipTools,

like pasting a date in a certain format, you can set up all sorts of keyboard shortcuts to do all

sorts of things without having to activate the menu first. But it is definitely useful to use

your second Global Keyboard Shortcut here to bring up the ClipManager. I've got it set to

Shift Command C so I can use Shift Command C to bring up the ClipManager. I can use the arrows

A Brief Introduction To ClipTools

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A Brief Introduction To ClipTools

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