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. See LICENSE.

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: