Tapbots has released Pastebot 3, a ground-up rewrite of the Mac clipboard manager that includes several powerful automation and customization options, along with two new pricing models.
Pastebot was already one of the Mac’s best clipboard utilities, capable of managing an extensive collection of copied text and images in multiple formats, PDFs, URLs, files, and HTML, along with metadata. The app can handle up to 1,500 clippings and features fast search, extensive customizable keyboard shortcuts, list and detail views of clipboard items, and iCloud sync between multiple Macs.
What sets Pastebot 3 apart is its addition of deep automation tools. Not only does the update add MCP support, making it an excellent tool to use with Claude or ChatGPT/Codex, but it includes a brand new CLI that you or an agent can use from Terminal or incorporate into scripts you build. Commands include:
- List available Pastebins
- Browse and search clipboard history
- Filter results by Pastebin or date
- Retrieve the full text of a clipping
- Retrieve images from clippings
- List available Pastebot filters
- Apply filters to clippings or supplied text
- Place an existing clipping on the clipboard
- Create new text or image clippings
- Paste clipboard contents into the frontmost app
- Delete individual clippings
- Clear the main clipboard history
If you’re looking to automate with Shortcuts instead, Tapbots has you covered there, too, with nine actions that feature a variety of parameters and filter options:
- Clear Pastebin
- Copy Clipping to Clipboard
- Filter
- Find Filter
- Find Pastebin
- Get Clipping by Index
- Get Clippings
- Paste Clipboard
- Paste Clipping
New filters have been added that allow you to transform clippings using text transformations and even shell scripts. Using the ability to script custom filters, I’ve begun adding a few of my own to Pastebot for things like adding and removing bullets from multiple lines of text. For any filter, just select a clipping, and you can preview how it will affect the clipping. You can even assign keyboard shortcuts to filters and combine them with other filters to chain actions together. Unfortunately, though, filters do not sync between Macs.
Another powerful productivity booster available in Pastebot is called Stacks. This feature used to be called Sequential Paste, but Stacks are much easier to visualize. From Pastebot’s main UI, you can select multiple items at once and right-click to add them to a Stack, or you can pick them one at a time in any order you’d like. As you select items, they’re numbered in the order you’ll paste them into a document using a keyboard shortcut. It’s an excellent feature for filling out forms or copying data from one spreadsheet to another.
Pastebot’s design has been modernized, too, while remaining recognizable to long-time users. Along with a new icon, Pastebot 3 features new toolbars and a more customizable sidebar that lets you rearrange items inside each section and collapse sections for a more streamlined look.
Pastebins, user-defined collections of saved clippings that won’t roll off the end of your clipboard once it fills up, are joined by customizable Smart Pastebins that remind me of Smart Lists in Reminders. Smart Pastebins can be created by combining any or all of up to nine criteria, providing a lot of flexibility. I haven’t used Smart Pastebins extensively yet, but they’re already making it easier for me to find copied URLs simply by setting up a Smart Pastebin that looks for “http” at the beginning of a clipping. Smart Pastebins can even match text using regex, which is great for creating lists of Markdown-formatted URLs and image links.
The bottom line is that whether you simply want to retrieve recently copied items and paste them somewhere or you’re a power user who wants to automate the way you work with lots of clippings all day long, Pastebot 3 has you covered. About the only shortcoming of the app, and it’s a big one, is the lack of an iPhone and iPad version. Pastebot got its start on the iPhone before moving to a Mac-only version a decade ago. I hope Pastebot returns to the iOS and iPadOS someday because a lot of users want that, me included. An iOS version of the app couldn’t do as much as it does on the Mac, but there are plenty of benefits to syncing your clipboard history to an iPhone or iPad, as apps like Paste and PastePal have shown.
Copy and paste is as timeless as any task on a computer. If you fill out forms and spreadsheets, maintain a collection of prompts for your AI agents, or just grab a lot of links, images, and other scraps from the web and other sources, having a clipboard manager like Pastebot 3 at your fingertips is essential – so essential, in fact, that when the beta ran out on me just before the app’s release date, my Mac immediately felt broken, which is about the highest recommendation I can give a Mac utility.
Currently, Pastebot is available directly from Tapbots for $39, which includes one year of updates, after which you can purchase an additional one year of updates at any time for $19.
Tapbots also plans to offer Pastebot 3 on the Mac App Store as a subscription with a 14-day free trial, after which it will cost $2.99/month or $24.99/year. However, the app is currently stuck in review by Apple. When it’s released on the App Store, we’ll add a link.
