macOS Tahoe 26 brought clipboard history to Spotlight, which is great. However, there’s much more that Apple can do, particularly with the help of Apple Intelligence and third-party models. Here’s how.
macOS absolutely needs its own Advanced Paste
If you’ve never heard about Microsoft PowerToys, this is a very interesting project that builds power-user features for Windows based on community input.
Despite its Windows 95 origins, the project in its current incarnation was relaunched on GitHub in 2019, and has been adding features ever since.
Here’s how Microsoft currently describes it:
Microsoft PowerToys is a set of free Microsoft Windows utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity. These utilities and shell enhancement tools are designed to help you customize Windows 10 and Windows 11 to suit your needs.
One of these utilities is Advanced Paste, which was launched last year, allowing users to paste the clipboard either as plain text, JSON, or markdown.
Since then, the feature has evolved and picked up features, such as support for processing text with ChatGPT via an OpenAI API key.
Today, Advanced Paste was updated to allow users to run the clipboard through any local model, removing the need for a paid API. In addition to that, Microsoft also expanded third-party support, adding Gemini, Mistral, and even Azure alongside OpenAI.
This means that now, with very little work, Windows users can:
- Copy text in one language, and paste it somewhere else in another;
- Copy text from a document, and paste it somewhere else as a structured table;
- Copy a draft for an email, and paste it with full grammar, spelling, and styling corrections and suggestions;
- Copy the outline of an idea, and paste it as code to get started on a project;
- Copy a transcript of a meeting, and paste its summary.
Advanced Paste even works with texts extracted directly from images, which is also pretty useful. And there’s actually more.
Is possible to do all of that on macOS with the help of the usual suspects, such as Shortcuts, or Keyboard Maestro? Absolutely.
But having this as a native feature would help countless more users who aren’t familiar or comfortable with these tools, but who would benefit immensely from being able to simply copy text as one thing, and (almost) immediately paste it as something else.
And yes, technically, neither PowerToys nor Advanced Paste are native Windows tools and features. But then again, Apple’s whole spiel for the longest time was about how the Mac offered better tools for creative and professional workflows than Windows, while being much easier to use. This feels like a perfect opportunity to make that case once again.
Do you have a good alternative to Advanced Paste on the Mac? Let us know in the comments.
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