Tapbots released Pastebot 3 on July 23, the first full new version of its Mac clipboard manager in nearly ten years — and the headline isn’t the fresh coat of paint, it’s how much of the app is now built around automation. Filters transform text as you paste it. Smart Pastebins sort clippings by rules you define. Stacks turn multi-item copy jobs into a single sequential paste. And for the first time, Pastebot plugs into Shortcuts and the command line, which means your clipboard can now participate in workflows that used to require gluing three utilities together.
This guide walks through setting all of that up, from a fresh install to a clipboard that quietly does work for you. You’ll need macOS 26 Tahoe or later — Pastebot 3 does not run on older systems, which 9to5Mac notes is the one significant catch buried in the requirements. Budget about 20 minutes for everything below.
Install and get through first-run setup
Download the app from Tapbots’ site, where a 14-day free trial is included. If you decide to keep it, you have two purchase routes: $39 direct from Tapbots (which includes one year of updates, with additional years at $19), or the App Store version at $2.99 per month / $24.99 per year — though at launch Tapbots said the App Store build was still awaiting Apple’s approval. Pastebot 2 owners get a $12.99 upgrade discount by entering their old license key at checkout.
On first launch, macOS will ask you to grant Pastebot accessibility permission. Don’t skip this: the paste-simulation features (Quick Paste, sequential stack pasting) can’t type into other apps without it. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility and enable Pastebot if you dismissed the prompt.
Once it’s running, Pastebot starts recording everything you copy into its Clipboard History. Copy a few things from different apps and open the main window — each clipping arrives with metadata (source app, timestamp, content type) and you can attach your own searchable notes to any of them.
Clipboard History search in Pastebot 3 — image: Tapbots
Step 1: Make the Quick Paste Menu your default paste
The single highest-value habit change: stop using plain ⌘V and start using the Quick Paste Menu. Press Shift + ⌘ + V in any app and a small palette appears at your cursor with your most recent clippings.
Three things to configure here:
- Number-key pasting. The last 10 copies are bound to number keys — hit
3and the third-most-recent clipping pastes immediately. No mouse, no window switching. This alone replaces the copy-switch-paste-switch-copy shuffle when you’re moving several values between two apps. - Pastebin cycling. With the menu open, ⌘← and ⌘→ cycle between your Custom Pastebins, so saved snippets are reachable from the same palette as recent history.
- The preview pane. Toggle the resizable preview window (dockable to three sides of the menu) so you can confirm exactly what a clipping contains before committing it — invaluable when two clippings look identical in their first line.
Paste any of the last 10 copies with a number key — image: Tapbots
Step 2: Build Custom and Smart Pastebins
Clipboard history is ephemeral; Pastebins are permanent. Create a Custom Pastebin for anything you paste more than a few times a week — email sign-offs, code license headers, support reply templates, invoice line items. Assign each bin a color and an icon or emoji so you can identify it at a glance while cycling through the Quick Paste Menu.
The automation piece is Smart Pastebins: rule-based bins that populate themselves. Instead of manually filing clippings, you define conditions — like a smart playlist, but for your clipboard. Practical rules that hold up in daily use:
- Everything copied from your terminal app → a “Shell” bin
- Clippings containing “http” → a “Links” bin
- Images only → a “Screenshots” bin
Add searchable notes to important clippings inside a bin. Six months later, “the staging DB connection string” is findable even if the string itself is unmemorable gibberish.
Step 3: Set up Filters — the actual automation engine
Filters are where Pastebot stops being a history tool and becomes a text-processing pipeline. A filter transforms a clipping as you paste it: strip formatting, change case, wrap text in Markdown, rewrite with find-and-replace, and so on. Pastebot 3 lets you build complex filters by stacking base filters — each one’s output feeds the next.
To build one: open Filters, create a new filter, and add transformation steps in order. Pastebot 3 adds a live preview window here — as you stack steps, you watch a sample clipping change at each stage, which kills the old guess-and-test loop. A few stacks worth stealing:
- Paste as plain quote: strip formatting → trim whitespace → prefix each line with
>. One keystroke turns any copied paragraph into a Markdown quote. - Title-case headline: trim → convert to title case. For anyone who writes headlines in a CMS all day.
- CSV to list: find-and-replace commas with newlines → trim. Turns a copied spreadsheet row into a vertical list.
Assign a keyboard shortcut to each filter you actually use (all shortcuts live in Settings, reviewable in one place). Applying a filter at paste time never modifies the stored clipping — the original stays in history untouched.
Watch filters transform text live as you build them — image: Tapbots
Step 4: Use Stacks for multi-item paste jobs
Stacks solve the “copy five things, paste five things” problem. Press the → arrow key on any clipping to add it to the stack, or open the stack window and everything you copy gets appended automatically. Then move to the destination and press ⌃⌘V repeatedly — each press pastes the next item in sequence.
The workflow shines in form-filling: copy a name, address, phone number, and order ID from a record in one pass, then tab through the destination form pasting each field in order. It also handles the reverse — collecting scattered fragments (quotes from a long document, say) and dumping them into your notes as one ordered sequence.
Paste each stacked clipping in sequence with ⌃⌘V — image: Tapbots
Step 5: Wire in Shortcuts, the CLI, and your iPhone
Pastebot 3’s Shortcuts support means clippings can enter and exit larger automations: a shortcut can grab the current clipboard, run it through a Pastebot filter, and hand the result to another app — or file incoming text into a specific Pastebin as part of a bigger flow. If you already run morning-routine or text-processing shortcuts, the clipboard is no longer a dead end in them.
The CLI support goes further for terminal users: script clipboard operations inside shell scripts, so a build script can push its output summary straight into a Pastebin, or a cron job can queue up text you’ll need later.
Two sync features round it out. iCloud Sync keeps clippings, Custom Pastebins, and filters identical across multiple Macs — build a filter once at the office, it’s on your laptop tonight. And Pastebot works with Apple’s Universal Clipboard: copy on your iPhone and the clipping lands in Pastebot on your Mac automatically, where every filter and bin applies to it like any local copy.
Step 6: Blacklist what should never be recorded
A clipboard manager records everything — including the password you just copied out of your password manager. Fix this before it becomes a problem: add sensitive apps to Pastebot’s Blacklist and nothing copied from them is ever stored. Pastebot 3 refines this with per-type rules: you can block an app entirely, or ignore only its images, text, or shortcuts individually — useful for, say, keeping text from a design tool while skipping its giant image exports.
Minimum blacklist: your password manager, any banking app, and your 2FA/authenticator utility. Do it on day one.
The payoff
Set up this way, Pastebot 3 fades into muscle memory: Shift+⌘+V replaces ⌘V, number keys replace re-copying, filters replace the “paste into a text editor to clean it up” detour, and stacks replace window-juggling. The app’s been recording history the whole time as a safety net — that thing you copied over an hour ago isn’t gone.
It took Tapbots almost a decade to ship this version — the company said on its announcement that a family member’s cancer diagnosis halted work and pushed the team to rebuild Pastebot while other projects paused. The result is a utility built around one idea executed thoroughly: your clipboard shouldn’t just remember things, it should do things. Twenty minutes of setup gets you there, and the 14-day trial is long enough to know whether the $39 sticks.
