Troubleshooting

The symptoms that have actually been reported, and what each one means.

Copying works, pasting does nothing

Almost always another clipboard manager holding Ctrl+V. The asymmetry is the tell — capture watches the clipboard, so it keeps working while the injected paste is being swallowed. See Running alongside another clipboard manager.

Ctrl+Shift+V has stopped pasting in my terminal

It should not have, and it does not in this version. Ctrl+Shift+V is left alone on purpose: it belongs to terminals and to paste-as-plain-text in browsers and editors, so PasteJump declines to open the gesture when Shift is already held at the trigger. Paste popping is reached by pressing Shift after the overlay is up.

Ctrl+Alt+V or Ctrl+Win+V does nothing

Deliberate. Only Ctrl+V opens the gesture, and any extra modifier is left to whoever owns it — on many keyboard layouts AltGr is Ctrl+Alt, so claiming that chord would swallow a keystroke you were using to type a character. See The gesture.

The gesture does nothing in one particular window

Three likely causes:

• The window is running as administrator. A non-elevated keyboard hook cannot see keystrokes in elevated windows, so the gesture cannot start there. This is a Windows security boundary, not a setting.
• Another program's hook is ahead of ours. As above.
• Security policy is intercepting that application's keyboard. See the next section.

Ctrl+V does nothing in one application, usually a browser

Everything else works. Copying in that application still works. Only the gesture is dead, and only there. On a managed machine this is usually not PasteJump at all.

Endpoint data-loss-prevention policy can route one application's keyboard input through a component running with more privilege than PasteJump has. Windows then excludes PasteJump's keyboard hook from that input — deliberately, as a security boundary — so the trigger key never arrives and no overlay can appear. Copying is unaffected because capture watches for clipboard changes instead of keystrokes, and no policy suppresses those. That asymmetry is what makes it look like a fault in PasteJump.

The fix is to run PasteJump as administrator. Right-click the tray icon and tick Always Run as Administrator. PasteJump asks Windows for permission once, registers a logon task so it starts elevated from then on, and restarts itself. The tick is also how you tell at a glance whether it is running elevated now.

If you would rather not run it elevated, the clipboard history window is unaffected: open it from the tray, select the clip you want, press Copy, then paste with your own Ctrl+V in the application. Your own keystrokes still reach it — it is only PasteJump that is prevented from seeing them.

Two things worth knowing before assuming this is the cause. It can come and go: the same application may work for an hour and then stop, because the policy is evaluated on the fly. And it is not confined to one program — a second clipboard manager, or any tool driven by a keyboard hook, fails in exactly the same application at the same time, which is the quickest way to confirm what you are looking at.

An application pastes the previous clip

Raise Pause Before Pasting under Settings, System. Office, Electron-based apps and remote-desktop clients cache the clipboard, and a paste keystroke arriving too early is served from that stale cache. 25 ms is the default; try 60–100.

An image reports a size far larger than the file it came from

That figure is correct. The clipboard carries images uncompressed, so a 146 KB PNG arrives as several megabytes of raw pixels, and the size column reports what the clipboard actually handed over. What is stored on disk is a small fraction of it — duplicate encodings of the same image are dropped at capture and everything stored is compressed.

Comparing the figure against Clipjump's is misleading: Clipjump shows the size of the lossy JPEG thumbnail it generates, not of the clip.

My history is several times too long

An import from Clipjump run more than once, before imports became idempotent. Use Remove Duplicates in the history window.

Thousands of imported entries vanished overnight

History retention. It means "do not keep history older than N days" and runs at every start-up, so an imported history spanning years is mostly deleted at the next launch. Set Days of History to Keep to 0. PasteJump offers this after an import for exactly this reason.

The history window shows fewer entries than exist

It says so in the status line when it is showing a subset. Raise Rows the History Window Loads under Settings, History.

One copy became two clips

Some applications publish a copy twice — the plain text first, then the same text again a fraction of a second later with the formatted versions added. Windows Terminal running a busy console application does this, and each publish raises its own clipboard notification.

PasteJump treats the second one as the same copy: within one second, an identical copy carrying more than what was stored replaces the stored clip in place, so you get one entry and the richer formats. Two knobs govern it, both in Settings, Advanced and both fine to leave alone:

"Same as the last copy" on a copy you made once

Fixed in 2026.1.0.167. It was the second publish described above being recognised as a repeat. If you see it on a build at least that new, the capture log below will say what happened.

Reading the capture log

PasteJump keeps a one-line-per-decision account of what capture did, in logs\capture.log beside the clip database — Settings, Advanced shows where that is. It looks like this:

A clip says [binary: something]

That is a clip which is not text, an image or files, and the name is the clipboard format it holds. A common one is System.Drawing.Bitmap, which means the program put a .NET object on the clipboard instead of a picture — PasteJump stored faithfully what it was given, and the format name is there so the reason is visible on the row rather than only in the database.

A copy was not recorded

The clipboard is a machine-wide lock, and another process can hold it. PasteJump retries with backoff and then twice more on a delay, but if a program holds the clipboard longer than that the copy is dropped. This is inherent to the Win32 clipboard rather than fixable — only made rarer.

The history hotkey does nothing

Another process already owns that chord; a registration that is refused is reported when it happens. Pick a different combination under Settings, Paste Mode, Open History With.

PasteJump will not start, or seems to start and vanish

An instance is already running — check the notification area. A second copy would install a second keyboard hook and fight the first over the clipboard, so it exits quietly instead.

Nothing is being recorded at all

Check the tray icon. Amber with pause bars means capture is paused; grey means PasteJump is disabled. Also check Watch the Clipboard under Settings, Capture, and whether the application you are copying from is on the Excluded Apps list.

This manual opens with every page blank

Windows has marked the file as downloaded from the internet, and blocks compiled help files from that source: every topic shows "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" and nothing else. Right-click PasteJump.chm in the PasteJump folder, choose Properties, tick Unblock at the bottom of the General tab, and press OK. PasteJump warns about this before opening the file, but only when it can tell — the mark is on the file, so unzipping the download without unblocking it first is the usual way to get here.

Help on the tray menu does nothing

PasteJump.chm is not beside the executable. It ships in the release download; a copy built from source does not include it, because the manual is compiled separately. The key list under Paste-mode keys is built into the program and always available.

Where the data is

data\pastejump.db and data\blobs, beside the executable by default, or under %LOCALAPPDATA%\PasteJump if you moved them. The settings are PasteJump.json in whichever location Store Settings In names; the two pointers themselves live in data-location.json beside the executable. The Advanced tab shows all of these resolved.