At a glance
- One keystroke, no pre-copy: ⌃⌥⌘C reads the current selection, splits it and queues it.
- Lines, commas, semicolons:
John,john@acme.com,+1 202 555 0136becomes three items. - The pieces land on the Stack: each is a row you can reorder, preview or drag out.
- Paste consumes and advances: ⌃⌘V drops the next piece, strikes it out and counts the rest.
- Hands-free fields: the Stack's "After:" key presses Tab or Enter for you.
How the split works
No pre-copy step. ⌃⌥⌘C reads whatever you have highlighted. It runs on the same selection-capture path as Klipto's ⌃⌘C Stack capture, so it works in any app that lets you select text.
Line breaks first, then commas and semicolons. A spreadsheet column splits by line. A CSV row splits into its values. One exported line spreads across separate fields with no retyping.
The pieces are visible. Each becomes a row on the Stack, which is a real panel rather than a hidden buffer. You see what is queued, and in what order, before you paste a single character.
Cleanup runs on the same items. Blank lines, smart quotes, invisible characters: Klipto's transformations apply to the split items on the way out, so the text gets fixed as it pastes.
Getting the selection is the hard part of this feature. Klipto sends a synthetic ⌘C to the app in front, and if your fingers are still down on ⌃ and ⌥ that app sees a chord instead of a copy. It then hands back whatever was on the clipboard beforehand, which reads as a broken feature and took me a while to trace.
So Klipto waits for you to release the modifiers, suppresses stray key events, sends the copy, then polls the pasteboard until the change count moves. The wait is a few milliseconds. It is the reason ⌃⌥⌘C returns what you actually highlighted.
Filling the fields
Three steps, and the third repeats until the list is empty.
1. Highlight the block: a spreadsheet column, a list of tags, a batch of prompts, a set of form values.
2. Press ⌃⌥⌘C. The Stack opens with each piece as its own item.
3. Press ⌃⌘V once per field. The row strikes out and the counter drops by one.
In the default ⌘C mode a plain ⌘V does step three as well, with the same consume-and-advance behavior. Set the Stack's "After:" key to Tab and the whole form becomes one repeated keystroke. Set it to ", " or "; " when you are rebuilding a delimited line instead of filling fields, and Klipto puts the separator in after each piece.
Compared with plain clipboard history
A history remembers past copies. It still holds a copied list as one blob, so you paste, reopen the panel and pick the next piece by hand every time.
| System clipboard | Basic clipboard history | Klipto Split Copy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hold a whole list | One item only | Yes, as one blob | Split into N items |
| Paste next and track progress | No | Manual | ⌃⌘V, "N left" |
| Split by line, comma, semicolon | No | No | Yes |
| Advance the field after a paste | No | No | After: key (Tab, Enter, arrow) |
Splitting happens on your Mac, offline. The text stays local, and Klipto only reaches the network to check for updates. It costs $19.99 once with updates included, and there is a free tier plus a 14-day Pro trial.