Manual index

The gesture

Press Ctrl+V and keep Ctrl held. An overlay appears near the text caret. Release Ctrl to commit whatever it is showing.

Clip 3 of 41. The chips read: pinned, its tags, the application it was copied from, POP because Shift is held, and the current paste format.

Every key below works while Ctrl is still down. You never have to look at the overlay to use it — it is there so you can, not because you must.

What it looks like

The overlay through seven of its states, as stepping, searching, filtering, marking and the X cycle would show them. Everything here happens while Ctrl is still held.

There is also a narrated tour of every window as a video, which a help file cannot play: this viewer is the old Internet Explorer engine, with no support for HTML5 video. It is published beside the manual instead — on the PasteJump website — and attached to each release on GitHub.

Moving through clips

The arrow keys and Home are alternatives, not replacements: the letters are the original Clipjump layout and they are not going anywhere. Use whichever your hand reaches for. The same applies to P beside Space and M beside Q further down.

H is the one key whose meaning changed. In Clipjump it opened the clip in an editor, which reads as “help” to almost everybody; it now opens the history window, and the editor answers to O.

Pasting

Pasting several clips as one

Note

Switched off until you ask for it. Marking clips during the gesture has no key out of the box, so nothing below happens and the overlay says nothing about it. Give it one in Settings, Keys — the row is Mark the clip to be pasted joined with the others, and J is free. Joining without a key is still there in the history window, where selecting several rows turns Copy into Copy Joined.

Once it has a key — J below — that key marks the clip being shown. Mark as many as you like — stepping and searching in between — and releasing Ctrl pastes them all as one clip, their text run together.

JOIN 3 is how many clips will be pasted. The tick means the clip on show is one of them, so you can tell whether pressing J again would add it or remove it.

This is not the same as Enter. Enter pastes clips one after another as separate pastes, which leaves the application to decide what happens between them — in a spreadsheet, separate cells. Joining produces a single clip, so it lands as a single paste.

• Order — The order you marked them in, not the order they sit in the stack. Marking a clip that is already marked moves it to the end, which is how you correct a sequence without starting again.
• What goes between — A new line by default. Change it in Settings, History — a space, a comma, a tab, or any text you like.
• Images — Left out, because two pictures cannot be concatenated into one. They still count towards JOIN n while marked, so the number always says how many clips you chose.
• Marks last one gesture — They are cleared when the gesture ends, however it ends. A mark surviving into the next Ctrl+V would make an ordinary paste produce something you assembled minutes earlier.
• With Shift — Paste popping deletes every marked clip, since it deletes what was pasted.

The same thing is available without the gesture: select several rows in the history window and press Copy.

Warning

Only Ctrl+V starts the gesture — nothing else. Any additional modifier is left entirely alone, because each one belongs to somebody:

• Ctrl+Shift+V is how every terminal pastes, and how browsers and editors paste as plain text. With no overlay open it passes straight through, so the terminal still gets it. Paste popping is unaffected, because it is armed by holding Shift and releasing Ctrl — not by pressing a key while Shift is down.
• Ctrl+Alt+V is AltGr+V on many keyboard layouts, which is how people type a character.
• Ctrl+Win+V belongs to the shell, which uses Win+V for Windows’ own clipboard history.

Organising

F1 during the gesture, or Paste-mode keys on the tray menu. It names the trigger letter you have configured rather than assuming V, and it has a button through to this manual.

F1 closes the overlay and restores the clipboard before the list appears. It has to: the list is a real window that takes the keyboard, and while the overlay is up the gesture is swallowing keys — including the ones the list is busy explaining. So read it, close it, and press Ctrl+V again.

Showing only one kind of clip

A chip names the filter, and the count changes with it — clip 2 of 5 rather than of 41.

This is what to reach for when you want the screenshot from twenty minutes ago and there are forty text clips in the way. Images are the clips most worth looking at before pasting, and the rarest in a stack, so stepping to one is the slowest thing the gesture does.

Two things are deliberate. The filter resets every time the gesture opens, because a filter that survived would show you a stack with most of it missing and only a small chip to explain why. And a filter that matches nothing is allowed — it shows an empty overlay rather than being skipped, so four taps of K always brings you back to seeing everything.

It combines with search: narrow to images, then F and type to search within them.

Note

If Store Images is off under Settings, Capture, the images filter will always be empty — nothing is recording them.

Search

Note

While the search box is open, every letter and digit is part of the query. None of the lettered actions fires — so typing output searches for “output” rather than opening the clip in an editor and pinning it on the way past. Press Ctrl+F to close the search first if you want one of those keys. The arrows are the only way to step through matches, because they are the one pair that can never be part of what you are typing.

Search mode adds a row above the preview: the query, and how many clips match it.

Search is the exception to “keep Ctrl held”: releasing it while searching does not commit, so you can type a query at your own pace — let go and type with both hands. The footer says what applies while the box is open: ↑↓ steps the matches, Enter pastes, Esc cancels and Ctrl+F closes the box. The lettered keys are deliberately absent there, because every letter is part of your query.

Working without holding Ctrl

Search is not the only way to put Ctrl down. L locks the overlay open: the overlay says LOCKED, releasing Ctrl no longer pastes anything, and every key goes on working with both hands free. It is the answer to browsing a long stack, reading a preview properly, or tagging a clip without keeping a finger on a modifier.

Locked: the chip says so, and the footer swaps to the two keys that now end the session.

Note

A locked session ends the way a search does — with Enter or Esc, not by letting go. The footer swaps to say so while the lock is on, because “release Ctrl to paste” stops being true.

Typing a clip out instead of pasting it

Some fields refuse a paste: a bank’s card-number box that blocks Ctrl+V in script, an installer that wants a licence key typed, a console or remote-desktop client that ignores the clipboard. Typing the clip out as individual keystrokes is the way in.

Warning

This ships switched off, and where it works is now known precisely. Typed into an ordinary Windows dialog or text box — the kind an installer, a licence prompt or a remote-desktop client puts in front of you, which is exactly where a paste is refused — a six-line clip arrives exactly, measured over repeated runs. Typed into Windows 11 Notepad or VS Code it loses characters, however slowly it is fed: those two draw their own text with an asynchronous input pipeline that discards injected keystrokes while it redraws, and no pacing fixes it.

So the letter is unassigned rather than the feature removed. Give Type the clip out a letter on the Keys tab if the places you need it are ordinary dialogs, and do not judge it by trying it in Notepad — that is the one target it is known to mangle.

Warning

It cannot rescue a window that ignores our keystrokes altogether. Typing uses the same mechanism as the paste keystroke, so where Windows is discarding synthetic input — a window running as administrator, or one whose input is being filtered by endpoint security — nothing arrives either way. That is what Always Run as Administrator in the tray menu is for.

How long it takes, and how to stop it

Typing is roughly a thousand times slower per character than pasting. Every character is a pair of keyboard events, and each one is delivered to every keyboard hook on the machine as well as to the window you are typing into. A clip that pastes in an instant can take minutes to type, with nothing on screen saying so.

Above about two thousand characters, PasteJump says how much it is about to type and reminds you that Esc stops it.

Longest Clip To Type Out on the Paste Mode tab is the ceiling, 10,000 characters by default. A longer clip is refused rather than half-typed, naming its length and the limit: typing the first ten thousand characters of a longer clip and stopping would look like success while quietly losing the rest. Raise it if you have a use for it — it goes up to a million, and Esc is always there.

Note

If a window drops characters because they arrive faster than a person could type them, set typeOutCharDelayMs in PasteJump.json — milliseconds of pause between batches of twenty characters. It is not on a tab because it is a repair for one stubborn application rather than a preference.

Every key, without leaving the overlay

? lists every key at the bottom of the overlay. / does the same thing, since the question mark is the shifted version of that key.

Every key, in the overlay, without ending the session. The list is built from your own bindings, so a letter you have moved shows where you moved it - and an action you have switched off is left out.

Unlike F1, which opens a window and therefore has to end the session first, this leaves the session exactly as it was — so the keys it lists can be tried as they are read. Press it again to hide the list. It is not remembered between gestures.

Deleting

Delete and X are different in kind. Delete acts at once; X only arms something for the moment you release Ctrl. Pressing Delete leaves what releasing Ctrl does entirely alone, so it will still paste whatever the overlay has moved on to.

After three taps of X. The banner is red, and it names what releasing Ctrl will now do — which is not pasting.

Warning

Delete All asks first. Three taps of X reaches it, and releasing Ctrl commits whatever mode you are in, so it is reachable by accident. It is the only irreversible thing the gesture can do, and it is the only one that prompts. Pinned clips survive it.

Moving the gesture off Ctrl+V

V is only the default in principle. Settings, Paste Mode, Hold Ctrl and Tap This Key would move the gesture to any letter not already used above, which would be the cleanest fix when something else on the machine owns Ctrl+V — but that control is disabled in this release pending more work, so the gesture is Ctrl+V for now. See Running alongside another clipboard manager.

Letters already bound to an action would not be offered, because the trigger key doubles as “step to an older clip” and would otherwise shadow that action for ever.

Where the overlay appears

Beside the text caret — where you are already looking.

That is the point of it: a clipboard picker in a fixed corner of the screen makes you glance away from the very place you are about to paste into, and glance back. PasteJump asks Windows where the caret is and puts the overlay just below and to the right of it, so the clip you are choosing appears next to the line you are choosing it for. Near the bottom of the screen it flips above the caret instead, rather than covering the line you are typing on.

Not every application tells Windows where its caret is, and there is no way for PasteJump to ask more politely. A caret that Windows knows about belongs to the edit controls it draws itself; an application that paints its own caret — which is most of the modern ones — reports none at all. This is not a guess about what they do internally, it is simply what the operating system will answer when asked.

Note that this does not divide neatly into old and new: ConEmu exposes a caret and Windows Terminal does not, though both are console hosts. It depends on how the text is drawn, not on how modern the program is.

Where there is no caret, the overlay centres itself on the window you are pasting into. That cannot be on the wrong monitor and cannot be behind the window you are working in, which are the two ways a clipboard picker becomes useless. It is a deliberate second choice rather than a failure: the mouse pointer was tried first and is worse, because it sits wherever you last left it — often in a toolbar at the top of the window, and on a multi-monitor desktop frequently on another screen entirely.

Note

The Start menu is a third case. Windows draws it above every ordinary window, PasteJump’s overlay included, so there is no position on top of it that you could see. The overlay steps aside to a corner of the screen instead. The same applies to anything else Windows keeps above other windows, and to an application you have pinned always-on-top — PasteJump would rather sit beside a window you deliberately pinned than cover it.

All of that is the default, and you can choose differently. Settings, Appearance, Where the Overlay Appears offers six answers: automatically as described above; at the caret with the pointer as the fallback, which is what PasteJump did before; always at the pointer; always centred on the window; in the bottom-right corner, where Windows puts its own notifications; or pinned to a fixed position of your own. Only the pinned position and the corner override the Start menu rule, on the grounds that somebody who names a place has said what they want.

The copy notification uses the same mechanism, chosen separately under Settings, Appearance, Show a Brief Notification. It stays at the mouse pointer by default, which is a sound default in its own right — a copy is often made with the mouse, so the pointer is where you were looking — but the same problem applies to a copy made from the keyboard, and now the same answers do too.

What the overlay shows

The row under the preview reads left to right as what the clip is, the facts about it, and when it was copied: Text · 6 lines, 119 characters with the date and time at the far right. A picture says Image and gives its resolution, a file copy says Files. Those are the same words the Clipboard History window uses, so one clip never reads two ways — and the date is local time, which is often the quickest way to tell two similar clips apart.

Each part is yours to switch off on the Appearance tab: What Kind of Clip It Is, the per-kind details and sizes, and When It Was Copied. The row survives on its own if you switch the others off. A clip PasteJump cannot describe is left unlabelled rather than called “Other”, since its preview already says [binary data].

A copied text file shows its contents too. The path stays on top, the first lines of the file appear beneath it in a muted colour, and the facts row gives the line count and the file’s size on disk — the same treatment a copied image file gets, where a thumbnail appears instead. Only the first file of a copy is read, only the first few kilobytes of it, never a file on a network share, and only for extensions that are plainly text: the overlay is redrawn on every tap of the trigger key, so nothing here may be slow. What a paste puts on the clipboard is still the path, which is why the contents are dimmed.

For text, the counts are of what PasteJump stored rather than of what it is showing you — the preview on screen is elided to fit. If the clip was longer than Characters Kept per Entry allows, both numbers carry a +: what you copied is bigger than anything that was kept, and saying so beats a confident wrong count.

• The position in the stack, as clip 3 of 41.
• A preview: the text, or the picture for an image clip, or the file names for a file copy.
• Chips for the current paste format, whether the clip is pinned, whether Shift is holding a pop, how many clips are marked to be joined, its tags, and which application it was copied from.
• The two chips that show something you can cycle — the paste format and the kind filter — name the key that changes them, as Original (Z) and images only (K). It is your letter, not the default, and it disappears along with the key reminders if you switch those off.
• A banner when X has put you in Cancel, Delete or Delete All.
• A row of key reminders along the bottom, which names the keys you have bound rather than the defaults. An action you switch off is left out of it.

Showing less of it

Most of that is description, and it is all optional. Settings, Appearance, What the Overlay Shows has a switch for each: the position in the stack, the paste format, tags, the source application, the PINNED marker and the key reminder. Everything is on to begin with.

The row under the preview is chosen per kind of clip, because the three do not report the same thing — text gives lines and characters, an image its resolution in pixels, a copied file its line count. A small grid pairs details and size against Text, Image and File, so you can keep resolutions for pictures and drop character counts for text. Anything that is neither text nor an image follows the File column.

Everything optional switched off: the clip, and the JOIN count — which no setting can hide.

Warning

Four things cannot be switched off, and that is deliberate. The POP chip, the JOIN count, the kind filter, and the Cancel / Delete / Delete All banner all change what releasing Ctrl will do. Hiding one of those would not make the overlay tidier — it would arm a deletion you cannot see, which is the one thing this overlay exists to prevent. The preview is not optional either: an overlay that says nothing about the clip is not quieter, it is broken.

Switching off both the details and the size removes the row under the preview entirely, rather than leaving an empty strip. Turning off the position still leaves No matching clips when a search finds nothing, since in that case it is the only thing there is to say.

Other keys are held back while the overlay is open

Any key that has no meaning above is swallowed for as long as the overlay is up, rather than reaching the application underneath. That is deliberate: you are holding Ctrl, and almost every Ctrl+key is a command somewhere — Ctrl+0 and Ctrl+= zoom an editor, Ctrl+W closes a tab, Ctrl+S saves. Without this, tapping around while choosing a clip would quietly zoom, save or close whatever was behind the overlay.

Two things are always let through:

• The modifiers themselves. The application is tracking them, and eating a release would leave it believing Ctrl is still held.
• Anything with Alt or the Windows key held, so Alt+Tab and the shell’s own shortcuts keep working. Switching away abandons the gesture, which also makes this the way out if the overlay ever seems stuck.

Releasing Ctrl ends the session, so the keyboard is never held for longer than you hold the key yourself.

Along the bottom is a muted reminder of the keys worth knowing when you have lost your place: A back to the newest, stepping, delete, locking the overlay open, cancel, and ? for the full list. Turn it off under Settings, Appearance once the gesture is in your fingers.

F1 is deliberately not in that row any more. It still opens the key card, and the card and the ? list both name it — but ? answers the same question better, without opening a window or ending the session, so it takes the slot.

The overlay never takes focus, so your typing target is untouched. How large an image preview may be, how much text is shown, and whether the overlay follows the caret or sits at a fixed position are all under Settings, Appearance.