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OptimusGrime

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 11, 2024
122
131
I”m struggling to understand the reasoning for limiting the feature in this way. I can’t imagine a situation where I wanted to see or search a history of things I selected, but only within the last 8 hours. Lunacy.
 
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If there were no limits at all, then the clipboard manager would eventually slow down due to how many items were stored there. You see this with ML and how larger LLM models can process fewer tokens per second because of how much data there is to look through.
 
On Windows I think it's a maximum number of entries, anyone know for sure? I just know that I shut the system down every day which resets it, so effectively there's the same 8 hour (working day) memory.
 
(I'm still on Sequoia) I use "Maccy" which has a preference to set the number of entries to keep.

I have it set to 100, text only, and sorted by "Time of last copy" (there are a couple of other sorting options).

 
Also, this is an Apple's concern for privacy. I know I end up with a lot of pasted usernames and passwords. I don't want those to remain indefinitely.
 
If there were no limits at all, then the clipboard manager would eventually slow down due to how many items were stored there. You see this with ML and how larger LLM models can process fewer tokens per second because of how much data there is to look through.
Spotlight indexes terabytes of data. An additional day of clipboard history isn't going to slow it down.

FWIW I use Keyboard Maestro and my history goes back to May.
 
I'm a very happy user of FlyCut


Very worth checking out if looking for something in this space
 
I guess that I shouldn't mind sticking with Paste, which I get via Setapp. Already have the feature, and have control over both how long to remember, and what apps to ignore from (I set apps like 1Password in this).
 
I”m struggling to understand the reasoning for limiting the feature in this way. I can’t imagine a situation where I wanted to see or search a history of things I selected, but only within the last 8 hours. Lunacy.

Frankly, I don't think it's going to be a concern because most users will never find out how to activate that clipboard manager anyway.

When I started exploring Tahoe, the clipboard manager appeared sometimes at random in some random scenarios but not others, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to activate it at will. Now I eventually googled it and, from the depths of a YouTube video, I discovered that I need to press the right arrow to display the clipboard manager icon. Which also doesn't work unless you clear the Spotlight search field.

So, unless Apple improves it, this option will only be known to a few power users, who won't use the clipboard manager anyway due to all the reasons mentioned above.
 
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