What's new

You can see the clip you want before you reach it. The overlay has three views now - one clip at a time as before, a numbered list of the clips either side, or thumbnails with a picture of every screenshot - and while it is open the mouse can scroll, click and point. And a clip is on disk the moment you copy it: a crash or a power cut no longer takes the day’s clips with it.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. No window, and no mouse needed. That gesture is unchanged and is still the whole of the idea; everything below is for the moment you want more than the next clip.

Which download

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself. The same files are mirrored, byte for byte, to SourceForge.

Upgrading from 2026.3.1 or earlier: use Check for updates on the tray menu, or unzip this over your existing folder. Your data folder - clips, history, blobs and settings - is untouched either way. Nothing changes until you choose a view: the overlay opens exactly as it did.

Fixed first, because it is the one that mattered

• A crash or a hard reset could lose every clip copied since PasteJump last closed. Each clip was committed as it arrived, but a commit was not yet a save: the database waited for the system to write it out, and the only time PasteJump made sure was when it exited. On the machine this was found on, a hard reset took a day’s clips with it while the log recorded every one as stored. Every clip is now written to disk as it is copied, and the capture log says so at each start. Nothing about the speed of copying changes.
• And a copy of the whole store is kept for each of the last seven days, in data\backups, taken ten minutes after start and again each day on a machine that is never restarted. The manual’s Troubleshooting page says how to restore one.

New: three ways to see the stack

• List: the current clip with its neighbours above and below, one line each. Each row is numbered with the digit that jumps to it - press 3 and you are there - and the list goes round the ends of the stack, as stepping does. Optionally, the current clip’s preview sits in a pane beside the list instead.
• Thumbnails: every clip a tile - the picture for a screenshot, the first lines of text, the names of copied files - each labelled with its kind and size, so a path, a file and a picture can be told apart at a glance. Four tile sizes, up to 320 by 240. The arrows move as they look: down is the tile below. Pictures are loaded and shrunk in the background, so a held key never waits for a large screenshot.
• A Style tab in Settings, with a card for each view. The gear on a card opens that view’s own options - rows for the list, tile size and tiles per row for the thumbnails - without choosing it.
• W switches the view for one paste, and the button on the overlay’s top line, which names the view and its key, does the same. The next paste opens in the view you chose in Settings.
• The overlay keeps still. The list and thumbnails are one size throughout. A single clip fits each clip, but where the overlay is centred - programs with no text cursor for it to sit beside - its top-left corner stays put, so it grows and shrinks from the bottom and right. Keep the Overlay One Size holds it fixed.

New: the mouse, while the overlay is open

The mouse is only listened to while the overlay is up. At every other moment your clicks and the wheel are your programs’ own, and Ctrl+wheel still zooms your browser.

• The wheel steps through clips, towards you for older and away for newer.
• Click the overlay to paste the clip it shows, or click any row or tile to paste that one. Pointing alone changes nothing, so a pointer resting on the overlay can never change what you paste.
• Right-click for a menu of every action, each with its key beside it - your own letters - so the menu teaches the keys. Opening it locks the overlay, so you can let go of Ctrl.
• Everything explains itself: rest the pointer on a tile, a row, any chip on the top line or any key in the hint along the bottom, and a tooltip says what it is and which key changes it.
• Settings from the overlay: the gear at the end of its top line, or Ctrl+, - the shortcut most programs use for their settings. Either closes the overlay first, pasting nothing.

Both the wheel and the clicks can be switched off, separately, on the Paste Mode tab.

Also fixed

• Holding Ctrl+V made the list and thumbnails views glitch: the list changed height by a few pixels as it went round the end of the stack, a large screenshot could make a step slower than the key repeats, and after switching views with W the overlay moved out and back on every repeat. All three are gone; the overlay now draws only the newest frame when the key outruns it, rather than falling behind.
• The first backup of the day no longer competes with signing in: it waits ten minutes after start.

The manual

• Two new pages: The overlay’s views and Using the mouse. Clips and history explains what reaches the disk and when, and the backups; Troubleshooting says how to restore one.
• Every screenshot is regenerated from the program, and the tour video on the website shows the new views, the mouse and the Style tab.
• The settings reference lists 82 settings, generated from the source so it cannot fall behind.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run - choose More info, then Run anyway. That is a deliberate, settled decision rather than an oversight: a signature that fails to validate looks worse than none at all. The SHA256 of each file is published with the release.

PasteJump tells you when it has started. A tray-only program gives no sign of being there - no window, and the notification area is the one place nobody is looking as they sign in - so the honest answer to “is it running?” used to be to go and hover the icon. It says so itself now, briefly, in the corner.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. No window, no mouse, no hands leaving the keyboard. That gesture is unchanged and is still the whole of the idea.

Which download

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself. The same files are mirrored, byte for byte, to SourceForge.

Upgrading from 2026.3 or earlier: unzip this over your existing folder, or beside it. Your data folder - clips, history, blobs and settings - is untouched either way.

This is a patch release. Nothing about the gesture changes, and someone on 2026.3 who skips it loses nothing they were relying on: what is here is one small, optional capability and two fixes to things PasteJump said rather than to anything it did. The notes are short on purpose.

New: it says when it has started

• A brief notice in the corner, naming the version you are running and the chord to paste with. It never takes focus, so it cannot interrupt whatever you are typing as you sign in.
• Three answers, under Settings, System. Every time it starts is the default and is what somebody who stops and starts PasteJump themselves wants. Only after an update is silent from day to day and speaks up once when the version actually changes - the one moment the program has genuinely become something else. Never is what every release before this one did.
• It says so when capture is paused, or when PasteJump is disabled, rather than simply claiming to be running. That matters more than it sounds: pausing survives a restart, so you can sign in to a PasteJump that is running and recording nothing, and nothing else on screen would tell you.
• A splash screen during start-up was considered and rejected on a measurement rather than a preference: about 171 ms of a 286 ms warm start happens before any of PasteJump’s own code runs, so a splash could only cover the last third of it and would flash.

Fixed

• A range copied from Excel was labelled a picture while pasting as text, which is the most confusing thing this program can do - the label disagreeing with what pasting produces. Nothing was ever lost: such a clip carries 26 formats and every paste was already perfect. Excel publishes a bitmap rendering of the cells beside the cells themselves, and the old rule asked “is there a picture?” before “is there text?”. Text wins now, and a clip is called a picture only when there is no text at all - which is exactly a screenshot, the case the old order existed for. Clips already captured are repaired at start-up, since the label is stored rather than worked out each time. The preview is unaffected either way: it shows a picture whenever the clip has one, whatever the label says.
• PasteJump offered to import your Clipjump history over a store that already had clips in it. Reported from a new laptop: the whole installation was copied across, and PasteJump asked anyway while a data folder holding 1,000 clips and 5,919 history entries sat beside the executable. Being asked was the mild half - answering yes would have merged a legacy archive into a live history. The offer now looks at the store, not only at whether the question has been asked before on this machine.
• The manual no longer describes a download that does not exist. Its first page recommended the single-file …-win-x64.zip, retired in 2026.3, and advised against the archive that actually ships.
• Three screenshots were missing from the compiled manual entirely - the lock-open overlay, the key list and the filtered history - because they were never listed in the help project file. The compiled manual reports the same image count either way, so this was found by decompiling it rather than by reading its build output.

The manual

• Every page now carries a picture of what it describes. Getting started, The tray icon, Troubleshooting, Coexisting and Two stores had none; the tray menu had never been shown at all, on the page about the tray menu.
• A generated Settings reference, listing all 71 settings with their defaults, types and the tab each one lives on. Generated from the source rather than written out, so it cannot fall behind the program.
• The sidebar and page order now follow the same shape as the website.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run - choose More info, then Run anyway. That is a deliberate, settled decision rather than an oversight: a signature that fails to validate looks worse than none at all. The SHA256 of each file is published with the release.

The update check works again, and this is the release that proves it. Making the repository private on 2026-09-08 broke it completely rather than partially — a private repository answers GitHub’s release API with the same 404 an empty one does, so no installed copy could ever be told that a version exists. That is fixed here, and it is the main reason to take this release.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. No window, no mouse, no hands leaving the keyboard. That gesture is unchanged and is still the whole of the idea.

Which download

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself. The same files are mirrored, byte for byte, to SourceForge.

There is no longer a single-file …-win-x64.zip, and that is deliberate. One PasteJump.exe was the nicer thing to download and it spent about a second of every warm launch unpacking itself before any of PasteJump’s code ran — roughly 1.26 s against 0.29 s — on a program that starts at logon and then runs all day. It was not even smaller: a single-file bundle is already compressed, so the unpacked archive is no larger. The fast shape is simply the download now. If you are on the old one, unzip this over it or beside it; your data folder is untouched either way.

Note the remaining archive kept its -unpacked name rather than taking over the old one, so no file name has ever changed what is inside it.

The update check

• It reads a small manifest on the public website instead of GitHub’s API, because the API cannot answer for a private repository and never will again. The manifest is served from a repository that is public, so this keeps working whatever the source repository’s visibility is. Nothing about the channels changed — Stable, Delayed and Developer behave exactly as before.
• A 404 is no longer interpreted as “no releases yet”. GitHub returns 404 both for a project that has published nothing and for one you cannot see, and the status code cannot tell them apart — so the old message confidently told people there was no stable release when there was one. It now reports what it actually found and points at SourceForge, which is public.
• Downloads go to SourceForge, since a GitHub release page is exactly what a reader without access cannot open.
• There is an Update button now, beside Open page and Later. Where the release can be installed it downloads the archive that matches your copy, checks it against its published SHA256, and installs it when you restart — your clips and settings are untouched, and the previous files are kept so a failed install can be put back. Where it cannot, the prompt is the Open page / Later pair it has always been rather than a button that could only fail. On this release it will be the latter: the button needs the download to be fetchable without credentials, and PasteJump’s release archives are not yet, so it stays hidden until they are. Nothing to configure either way — it appears on its own.

Fixed

• One screenshot no longer arrives as two clips. Copying a picture from an OLE source — Edge, Windows Terminal, Visual Studio, Teams, OneNote and others — publishes it twice, and the second publish is byte-identical except for an 8-byte bookkeeping marker. That marker was part of the identity used to recognise a repeat, so the second publish looked like a brand new clip: an extra entry, an extra history row and a spurious copy notification, every time. Measured on 72 real pairs. Duplicates already in your store are collapsed once, automatically, at the next start-up — pinned clips and text clips are never touched.
• A type-out no longer claims to have failed when it succeeded. Pressing the type-out key reported “Stopped after 112 of 117 characters” for a six-line clip that had arrived whole, because it counted keystrokes and called them characters — a carriage-return pair is two characters and one key. The two are separate numbers now.
• The elevated logon task starts reliably. On a machine where PasteJump lives on a drive that is not ready a few seconds into sign-in, the task fired, failed with file not found for a file that plainly exists, and left PasteJump absent for the whole session with nothing on screen saying why. It now waits a minute and retries up to three times.
• The hook watchdog says why it fired, not just that it did, and the clipboard log no longer spends its budget on the one line that repeats hardest under load.

Licence: free, but no longer open source

PasteJump is now free-of-charge proprietary software and its source repository is private. It stays free for any use including commercial, on any number of machines, with no registration, and the official package may be mirrored unmodified. What is no longer permitted is modifying, repackaging, selling or decompiling it. The terms are in LICENSE.txt in the download.

Releases up to and including 2026.2.0.249 were published under MIT and remain so — a permission already granted is not being withdrawn.

The third-party components PasteJump uses are unaffected: their licences and the attribution they require are unchanged, and the full notices still ship inside the program under Credits.

Honest about what is not verified

Everything here is covered by the automated tests, a UI harness that renders every window in both themes, and daily use on one machine. Three things rest on that daily use rather than on a measurement:

• Multi-monitor mixed-DPI placement of the overlay has not been measured — both monitors on the development machine report the same scaling.
• Focus retention across a wide range of applications is verified by use, not by instrumentation.
• Shift+Insert, the documented way to coexist with another clipboard manager, is a different chord and a few applications bind it elsewhere.

The type out a clip key is still unbound by default. It arrives exactly into classic Windows controls — the fields that tend to refuse a paste, which is the case it exists for — and drops the occasional character in Windows 11 Notepad and VS Code, which draw their own text through a pipeline that discards injected keystrokes while it relayouts. Bind it on the Keys tab if you want it.

Known limitation worth reading if you are on a managed machine

On some corporate machines, endpoint data-loss-prevention policy routes one application’s keyboard input — a browser, usually — through a component with more privilege than PasteJump has. Windows then hides that input from PasteJump’s keyboard hook by design, and Ctrl+V does nothing in that one application while working everywhere else. Copying keeps working, which makes it look like a PasteJump fault.

It is not one, and no version of this program can work around it: a low-level hook, raw input, a registered hotkey and injected keystrokes were all measured equally blind there, and three unrelated programs — including the original Clipjump — fail identically in the same application. Ticking Always Run as Administrator restores it. Failing that, the clipboard history window is unaffected — press Copy there and paste with your own Ctrl+V.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. That is a deliberate, settled decision rather than an oversight: a signature that fails to validate looks worse than none at all. The SHA256 of each file:

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. No window, no mouse, no hands leaving the keyboard. That gesture is the whole of the idea; everything else exists to support it.

This is the second release of 2026. It fixes a bug that stopped some pictures pasting at all, and adds three things you can do that 2026.1 could not.

The website shows it in a minute. The manual is readable online as well as shipping inside the program, and there is an architecture reference if you want to see how it works.

Which download

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself. The same files are mirrored, byte for byte, to SourceForge.

Your history and settings carry over — unzip over the old copy, or point the new one at the same data folder.

Fixed: a picture copied as PNG could not be pasted

Some applications put a picture on the clipboard as a PNG and nothing else — WhatsApp, Edge and Windows Terminal all do it for certain copies. Windows does not fill the gap for them, so PasteJump saw no bitmap, filed the copy as [binary], and later — once it had learnt to recognise the picture — showed it in the overlay and then handed the target application a clipboard it could not paste from.

Both halves are fixed. Such a clip is recognised as a picture, previewed, exported and edited as one, and on the way to the clipboard it gains a bitmap decoded from the PNG so anything can paste it. Clips already captured are repaired at start-up.

New: three things you can do

• L locks the overlay open. Ctrl stops holding the session together: let go and browse, search, tag or read a preview with both hands free. Enter pastes, Esc closes, and pressing L again with Ctrl held unlocks it. It also makes pasting several clips in a row comfortable, which previously meant holding Ctrl throughout.
• ? lists every key at the bottom of the overlay. Unlike F1 it opens no window and does not end the session, so the keys it names can be tried as you read them. The list is built from your own bindings, so a letter you have moved shows where you moved it.
• The overlay says what kind of clip it is. The row under the preview now reads what it is, the facts about it, and when it was copied — Text · 6 lines, 119 characters, Image · 895 × 462 · 1.6 MB, Files · 3 files, 1 folder. The same words the history window uses. Switch it off under Appearance if you would rather not have it.

Present but switched off: typing a clip out instead of pasting it

For fields that refuse a paste — a card-number box that blocks Ctrl+V in script, an installer that wants a licence key typed — PasteJump can type a clip out as individual keystrokes, touching the clipboard not at all.

It ships with no letter assigned, 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 gets refused — a six-line clip arrives exactly, over repeated runs. Typed into Windows 11 Notepad or VS Code it loses characters however slowly it is fed: both draw their own text through an asynchronous input pipeline that discards injected keystrokes while it redraws, and no pacing fixes that.

So the action is there and unbound rather than 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, which is the one target known to mangle it. It carries a length limit, and Esc stops one in progress.

Also

• The footer’s F1 reminder is now ?, which answers the same question without opening a window. F1 still works and is still listed in the key card and the ? list.
• Longest Clip To Type Out on the Paste Mode tab, and typeOutCharDelayMs in PasteJump.json for a window that drops fast input.
• The search box has its own footer now — arrows step the matches, Enter pastes, Ctrl+F closes it. It used to keep showing the lettered keys, none of which act while you are typing a query.
• The manual gained sections for all of the above, with pictures.

Verifying the download

Nothing here is code-signed, so Windows will name an unknown publisher on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. Check what you downloaded instead:

2a2780f0f4855331b0dce7b1a21574a478dae19134a7879cb8fe8ea7bbe4838b  PasteJump-2026.2.0.249-win-x64.zip
c488eb56c8043a5331a0f08e3f6a534cb78a8fd2861b79363cf08b11a9a95ab5  PasteJump-2026.2.0.249-win-x64-unpacked.zip
eff66624fa743b00e4dbadaf3a5fdc8e8cf66956801292229ce1e7ac4e07cdf6  PasteJump-2026.2.0.249-win-x64-net10.zip

Get-FileHash .\PasteJump-2026.2.0.249-win-x64.zip -Algorithm SHA256

The first stable release. Six pre-releases, a run of real bugs found by using it daily, and every one of them fixed and covered by a test. This is the same program 2026.1-pre6 was, with the pre-release label taken off.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. No window, no mouse, no hands leaving the keyboard. That gesture is the whole of the idea; everything else exists to support it.

The website shows it in a minute. The manual is readable online as well as shipping inside the program, and there is an architecture reference if you want to see how it works.

Which download

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself. The same files are mirrored, byte for byte, to SourceForge.

What PasteJump does

• The gesture. Ctrl+V steps back through the clip stack with a small overlay showing what you are about to paste. Release Ctrl and it pastes. Nothing to learn beyond the chord you already use.
• Search without leaving the keyboard. Press F mid-gesture and type; the stack narrows as you go. No letter is an action while you are typing a query.
• Every clipboard format is kept, so a paste into Word arrives as it left Word, and an Excel range pastes back into Excel with its formatting intact — 24 of 25 formats byte-identical on a real Excel round trip, the one difference being a locale field Windows regenerates itself.
• Pin what you reach for, filter the stack by kind, mark several clips and paste them joined.
• A history window with full-text search over everything you have copied, image previews that zoom and pan, and per-row actions.
• Nineteen themes, or write your own — a theme is a small JSON file of named colours, and a three-line one that recolours the accent is legal and complete.
• Portable, and yours. One executable, no installer, no account, no network except when you ask it to check for updates.

Since 2026.1-pre6

Nothing in the program. This release exists to stop being a pre-release: with a stable release published, the Stable update channel — the default — finally has something to find, so an existing copy will now be told when a new version is out.

Everything else in this release is described in the pre-release notes: pre6 brought the working update check, update channels and the Credits window; pre3 carried the bulk of the bug fixes.

Honest about what is not verified

Everything below is tested by 1130 automated tests, a UI harness that renders every window in both themes, and daily use on one machine. Three things rest on that daily use rather than on a measurement, and are worth knowing:

• Multi-monitor mixed-DPI placement of the overlay has not been measured, because both monitors on the development machine report the same scaling.
• Focus retention across a wide range of applications is verified by use, not by instrumentation.
• Shift+Insert, the documented way to coexist with another clipboard manager, is a different chord and a few applications bind it elsewhere.

Known limitation worth reading if you are on a managed machine

On some corporate machines, endpoint data-loss-prevention policy routes one application’s keyboard input — a browser, usually — through a component with more privilege than PasteJump has. Windows then hides that input from PasteJump’s keyboard hook by design, and Ctrl+V does nothing in that one application while working everywhere else. Copying keeps working, which makes it look like a PasteJump fault.

It is not one, and no version of this program can work around it: a low-level hook, raw input, a registered hotkey and injected keystrokes were all measured equally blind there, and three unrelated programs — including the original Clipjump — fail identically in the same application. Ticking Always Run as Administrator restores it. Failing that, the clipboard history window is unaffected — press Copy there and paste with your own Ctrl+V. See Troubleshooting.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. That is a deliberate, settled decision rather than an oversight: a signature that fails to validate looks worse than none at all. The SHA256 of each file: