How to copy and paste multiple items at once on a Mac

By the CopyPal team · 17 September 2026 · 6 min read

Copy, switch apps, paste, switch back, copy the next thing. If you have ever moved five pieces of information from one document to another, you know the dance. macOS gives you one clipboard slot. Here are four ways around it, from the built-in tricks to the tools that make it a non-issue.

Method 1: the built-in tricks

macOS has no "copy several things" feature, but two habits get you part of the way.

Use a scratch note. Open Notes or TextEdit next to your source, copy each item and paste it into the note in turn, then copy the whole note at the end. It works. It also means every batch costs you a dozen extra keystrokes and a note you have to clean up afterwards.

Drag and drop text. Select text, then drag it into another window. For two visible windows this is quicker than copying, and it does not touch the clipboard at all. It falls apart as soon as the destination is in another Space or behind something.

Both tricks share the same weakness: the moment you copy something else, the previous item is gone. That is the problem a clipboard manager solves.

Method 2: a paste stack

With CopyPal installed, every copy you make is kept, so "copy multiple items" becomes "copy them like you always do". The paste stack then takes care of the pasting.

1. Copy each item as usual. Five things, ten things, it does not matter.
2. Press ⇧⌘V to open the panel where you want to paste.
3. ⌘-click each item you want. A banner shows "3 in stack" and the chosen rows get a tick.
4. Press ↩ to paste them all at once, in the order you picked them.

What goes between the items is up to you. In Settings under Pasting, choose a line break, a blank line, a space, a tab or a comma. Tabs are handy for dropping several values into a spreadsheet row in one go.

Prefer to place each item yourself? Press ⌘↩ instead. The first item is pasted immediately, and every following ⌘V pastes the next one in line, so you can hop between form fields and paste, paste, paste without opening the panel again.

Method 3: quick paste with ⌘1 to ⌘9

For the last few things you copied there is an even shorter route. Open the panel and press ⌘1 to paste the newest item, ⌘2 for the one before, and so on up to ⌘9. The numbers sit next to each row, so you never have to count. This is the fastest way to alternate between two or three things you copied a minute ago.

Method 4: snippets for what you type every day

Some things you paste are not really clips. They are the same email signature, the same address, the same "thanks for reaching out" opener, day after day. Turn those into snippets. Select the item in CopyPal, type a short keyword such as ;sig into the Snippet keyword field and press Return. From then on, typing ;sig in any app, Mail, Slack, a web form, replaces it with the full text.

Bonus: name and file the things you reuse

Once you keep everything, finding the right item matters. Two small features help. You can give any item a name, so a long address shows up in the list as "Venue address" instead of the first line of the street. And you can save items to groups such as Design or Research, which keep them out of the way until you need them and safe from being trimmed by the history limit.

Shortcut recap