I’ve tried countless clipboard managers, though most of them are useful, but all of them have one or two things in common, they’re either “obtrusive” or have a high memory footprint. What I meant by obtrusive is that they cannot be hidden completely, letting you only hide the clipboard at the left/right/top/bottom of your screen with a little bit of the app jutting out of the screen, visible to the eye. That’s not very elegant.

Stuf (£12.99), written by The Escapers is simple and gets the job done. Utilizing Leopard’s new Heads Up Display technology, also known as the HUD, not only does the user interface look like part of your Mac, it’s also easy on your system’s memory resources which is an important aspect especially if you have many programs open at the same time and already eating up lots of system resources.

Clipboard managers are useful if you find yourself copying text, images or both, and needing them all over again just to realise that you’ve over-written your clipboard with a newly copied item. As a web developer I find that this is a very useful tool to boost my productivity as I’m dealing with codes and snippets everyday.

Stuf User Interface

This is the HUD window and this is all there is to the app other than the preferences window. I’ve set the background of the HUD window to white for my liking, of course you can change the text and background to whatever color you want via the preference window:

You can also create multiple clipboards so that you can store certain snippets that you might want to use in future.

Bring up Stuf via Hotkey

What is vital for every clipboard manager is that it has to be hidden from view when you don’t need it but lets you call up the app easily via a hotkey when you do. From the preference window, you can set your own custom hot key. I set it to “alt + S” in this instance. “S” stands for Stuf, so it’s easy to remember.

Clipboard Sharing

If you have multiple Macs and would like to have a synchronized set of clipboard items, this feature is nifty.

To conclude, Stuf succeeds in both form and function, although it lacks the option of pasting unformatted text which I find very useful in other clipboard manager programs. To counter this, I’ll share with you a simple and quickest way to paste unformatted text in the next coming post.

Stay tuned!

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool: