Klippster Center

Klippster Center is one small panel that shows what is on your clipboard, what was on it a moment ago, the Klipps you have pinned, and your Shelf — a place to park things on their way between apps.

There are several ways to it. Which one you use is a matter of taste; they all open the same panel.

#Getting to it

After you copy something. A small preview slides out of a screen corner. Click it to save that Klipp as a file — that is the same one-click save Klippster has always had. Move the mouse onto it instead and it opens up, showing your recent Klipps and a glimpse of what is on your Shelf. From there, Expand Klippster Center opens the whole thing.

With the pointer. Touch a screen corner and a small square unfolds out of it at once — the same way macOS's own Quick Note corner shows its little page curl. Keep driving into the corner and Klippster Center comes out of it. See The corner, step by step.

Dragging a file there skips all of that — with something in hand the corner opens all the way straight off, and from further out, so a file goes from Finder to the Shelf in one movement.

With the keyboard. ⌘⌥V from any app — and Esc closes it again, whether the keyboard or the corner opened it. (Only a panel you asked for listens for Esc; the small preview after a copy never touches your keys.)

From the menu bar. Click the Klippster icon and choose Klippster Center.

#The corner, step by step

Touch the corner and it answers immediately — a small square unfolds out of the corner point, about the size of a Dock icon, carrying the Klippster mark and nothing else. Its outer edges run into the edges of the screen, so it does not look like a little window parked near the corner; it looks like the tip of something behind your desktop. Which is what it is.

Then it waits. Nothing counts down, and it will not open by itself. Hovering it brightens the mark and does nothing more.

Keep driving into the corner and Klippster Center comes out of it. The screen edges have already stopped your pointer, so pushing further in is the one movement left — and it is the one that opens the panel. You never have to aim at anything: it comes out of the same corner you are already in, with what was on your clipboard as its first row.

Or, if you prefer a control: click the square. Immediate, and the same ending.

Reaching the corner always shows the square, however fast you got there. Settings ▸ Klippster Center has a switch that opens the Center outright when you throw the pointer into the corner; it is off, because coming back to a corner you have just used is also a quick, aimed movement, so it opened the panel when you only meant to look.

Moving away costs nothing, and undoes everything. The moment your pointer leaves the square, it folds back into the corner point — no waiting, no leftovers, and nothing that has to settle before the corner works again. It is a clean slate too: touch the corner again and you get the square again, not the panel, however quickly you come back. Flicking the mouse past the corner on the way to the Dock produces a square for the fraction of a second it takes to cross it, and that is the entire price.

Move the pointer off the panel and it drives back out of the corner, after a quarter of a second — the same way it came. The whole gesture answers the pointer from beginning to end: touch the corner and the square appears, leave it and it folds, push through and the panel comes out, move away and it goes. Nothing to dismiss, and nothing left standing behind you.

The quarter-second is there so that crossing an edge is not a decision — overshoot a row you were reaching for and the panel is still there. Coming back cancels it outright, and the corner the panel came out of still counts as being on it, so resting your pointer where you pushed does not start the clock at all. Esc closes it too, and so does a click anywhere outside. Right after it closes the corner stays quiet for a moment, so leaving with the pointer still parked in the corner does not pull it straight back out.

Once you put something down in it, it stays. Drop a file on the Shelf, open the Shelf by name, or remove a row, and the panel stops being an ephemeral reveal — from then on it waits, because a surface you are putting things on must not slide away while you fetch the next one. Then it is Esc or a click outside, as before. Dragging a Klipp out of the panel does not close it either, however far the drag travels.

Where it appears. The panel sits about 16 pt from the corner you drove into — the same place macOS puts Quick Note, which means it lies across the end of the Dock rather than holding above it. That is deliberate: a panel that keeps clear of the Dock ends up a whole Dock's height away from the corner you actually pointed at, and reads as arriving somewhere else. While it stands, it covers the outermost Dock icons.

#How it moves

The motion is copied, frame by frame, from the corner surface macOS ships — most of the durations below were measured off Quick Note rather than chosen.

• The square grows out of the corner point in about a fifth of a second, and the corner it touches never moves — the square gets bigger, it does not fly in and park. Most of that growth happens in the first third of the time, then it settles and stops dead. No bounce, and no shadow: at that size it is part of the screen edge.
• The panel comes out from behind the corner, full size, along the diagonal, in about a fifth of a second. It does not unfold or inflate out of the square — nothing changes shape at any point, and the panel you end up looking at is the same size the whole way in. The square is gone the moment it sets off, and the panel carries its shadow from the first frame, because it is no longer part of the edge.
• Everything travels the diagonal through the corner point, coming and going. The panel is never seen sliding in from the side of the screen — it comes out from behind it, which is the difference between a drawer in a corner and a window that happens to be near one.
• Leaving reverses it: the panel drives back out the way it came. Neither end bounces.
• Reduce Motion is respected per animation. With System Settings ▸ Accessibility ▸ Display ▸ Reduce motion on, nothing travels: the panel fades in where it will stand and fades out again.

#If a corner is already busy

macOS has its own Hot Corners (System Settings ▸ Desktop & Dock), and Quick Note usually sits in the bottom right. Klippster reads which corners are taken and stays out of their way — the corner picker marks them, and picks a free one for you. The copy preview can share a corner with them safely: it only ever reacts to a copy, never to your pointer.

#What is in it

The current Klipp is always at the top, and always the thing your eye lands on first.

Recent is a row of your last Klipps, newest first. Click one to put it back on the clipboard. Pinned is the same, for the Klipps you keep coming back to. Either one is left out entirely while it is empty, rather than taking up room to tell you so.

Open Clipboard History… is there for everything else — searching, folders, editing. See Clipboard History.

#Seeing all of them — My Klipps

The panel shows five Klipps at a time, which is a glance rather than a look. The small ⛶ button at the right-hand end of a section heading opens My Klipps — a window beside the panel holding the whole of that group as a grid of pictures.

There is one on the Recent/Pinned heading and one on Shelf, and each opens on the group it sits beside. Once open you can switch between Recent, Pinned and Shelf with the tabs at the top, search, sort newest or oldest first, and swap the grid for a list.

It does the same two things the panel does and nothing more: click a Klipp to put it back on your clipboard, or drag it out to wherever you want it. Nothing there deletes, renames or files anything — that is what Clipboard History is for. A Shelf row is a file rather than something to paste, so clicking one shows it in Finder instead.

Klippster Center stays open behind it. Close My Klipps with the ✕, with Escape, or by clicking somewhere else; closing it leaves the panel where it was.

#Dragging a Klipp out

Every Klipp on the panel can be dragged straight out of it — the current one, and anything in Recent or Pinned. On Original — the default — where you drop it decides what arrives:

• A Finder window, or anywhere that takes files — you get a file, named the way Klippster would have named it in a Save dialog.
• A document, a message, a text field — you get the content itself, exactly as if you had pasted it.

Pictures and PDFs always travel as a file, even on Original — a chat or a mail composer takes them as an attachment, which is also the only thing most of them can take. Nothing is converted: the file carries the Klipp's own bytes, so a GIF stays animated and a PDF keeps every page.

Once you set a format, that choice takes over and the Klipp always travels as a file — see below.

A Klipp you copied in Finder drags out as that file, untouched — nothing is converted, and your original never moves.

Right-click a Klipp to choose what it becomes: JPEG, PDF, Markdown, whatever that Klipp can be. The default is Original — a Klipp keeps the format it arrived in until you say otherwise.

The choice applies to that one Klipp. Setting a screenshot to JPEG says nothing about the next screenshot, or about anything else on the panel; every Klipp answers for itself, and the answer sticks to it. It is the same choice the Shelf's format button makes, so a row and a Klipp cannot disagree about what "JPEG" means.

Once you have picked something other than Original, that Klipp carries a small format badge in the corner — JPG, PDF — so you can see what a drag will produce before you start one. On Original there is no badge: nothing is being changed, and a mark on every Klipp would be noise.

Clicking is unchanged: a click on a Klipp still puts it back on your clipboard, and a click on the current Klipp still opens the format chooser. The drag only starts once you have actually moved.

#What a Klipp actually is

Rest the pointer on a Klipp in Recent or Pinned and a small card appears beside it: what kind of thing it is, how big, which app you copied it from, when, and what a drag would produce. For a copied file it also says which folder it is in — or that it has moved, gone to the Bin, or been deleted.

The tiles are pictures on purpose — they are for recognising a Klipp at a glance, and a column of truncated sentences is worse at that. The card is where the words live until you ask for them.

#Choosing the format on the way out — ⌘ and drag

Sometimes the Klipp's current choice is not the one you want. Hold ⌘ and start dragging a Klipp: instead of a drag, the format chooser opens. Pick any format the Klipp supports — you can see what each one will weigh — and that becomes what the Klipp drags out as, badge and all. The Center comes straight back with the badge showing, so the drag you were making can simply continue.

Edit Before Dragging… takes the detour through the image or text editor first — crop, redact, rewrite — and asks where the result should go when you export.

The chooser has to come before the drag, not at the drop, and the reason is worth knowing: the app you drop on decides what it is taking out of a drag the moment your pointer arrives over it. A folder takes the file, a chat window takes the text. Once you have let go, that is already settled — so Klippster asks while the answer can still change.

A Klipp you copied in Finder drags out as that file, so ⌘ does nothing there — there is nothing to convert.

#The Shelf

Drag a file onto Klippster Center and it parks there. Drag it back out later, anywhere you like. That is the whole idea: somewhere to put things while you are moving them between apps.

It holds two kinds of thing, and the row tells you which:

• In Finder — the file stays exactly where it is. Klippster just remembers where to find it. If you move or delete it elsewhere, the row says so and offers to help you find it again.
• Stored by Klippster — something with no file of its own, like an image dragged out of a browser. Klippster keeps it, which means it holds the only copy.

The Shelf survives quitting and restarting. It is a desk, not a clipboard.

Right-click a row for everything it can do: the format it drags out as, Reveal in Finder, and taking it off the Shelf. The menu says which of two things that means — a link to your file is removed (the file stays exactly where it is), something Klippster stores itself is deleted, because Klippster holds the only copy.

Two rows are shown at a time and the rest scroll — the panel hangs off a screen edge and has to stay small, or what is on your clipboard right now would be pushed further away with every drop. When there is more than fits, the heading counts them: SHELF · 4.

#Dragging out in another format

Hover a row and a small format button appears — PNG ▾, or whatever the row is now. Click it and pick something else, then drag the row out: it arrives in the format you chose. Klippster remembers the choice for that row, so it is still set the next time you open the panel — and every other row is left exactly as it was.

The default is always Original. Klippster never converts to a lossier format without being asked.

#What is in a row

The same card as for a Klipp: rest the pointer on a Shelf row for a moment and it appears beside it with the rest of the story: what macOS calls the file, how big it is, which folder it is in — or that Klippster is holding the only copy — when it arrived, when you last reached for it, and what a drag would produce.

Nothing is hidden behind a button: the row stays short because the panel hangs off a screen edge, and the card is where the detail lives until you ask for it. It goes away as soon as the pointer does.

A row whose file has moved says where it is now, because that is where a drag would find it. One in the Bin says so — recoverable until it is emptied — and a deleted one says that plainly.

#How much fits

The Shelf holds five items. Klippster Pro removes the limit.

When it is full, Klippster tells you rather than quietly throwing something away — removing a row yourself is just as good an answer as a licence. Items Klippster stores itself are the only copy, so nothing is ever silently evicted to make space.

#Tidying up

In Settings ▸ Klippster Center ▸ Shelf:

• Links to files are removed automatically after a while. Nothing is lost — your file is untouched.
• Items Klippster stores itself are kept until you remove them. Automatic removal for those is off by default, and has its own setting, because switching it on eventually deletes the only copy.
• Clear Shelf… empties it, and tells you first how many items exist nowhere else.

#Private Mode and the Shelf

Private Mode stops Klippster watching your clipboard. The Shelf keeps working, because dragging something onto Klippster is something you do on purpose. Nothing arrives there unless you put it there.