The one gesture that matters
1. Hold ⌥ and ⌘, press V, and keep the modifiers down.
2. Type part of what you copied. The list filters as you type.
3. Use ↑ and ↓ if the first hit is not the one you want.
4. Release ⌥⌘. The selected item pastes and the popup closes.
Nothing here waits for you. The popup opens on the keypress and closes on the release, so the whole paste takes about as long as pressing ⌘V twice.
The release is the part that took the work. Holding modifiers, watching for the exact moment they lift, and deciding between paste-and-close or stay-open involves fighting macOS event handling, and I spent three hours on one bug where the popup refused to close on key release.
The keyboard set stays consistent inside the popup. ⌘← and ⌘→ move between History, Favorites, Snippets and Stack. ⇧Enter pastes the text Klipto recognised inside a copied image, so a screenshot of a serial number becomes typed characters without a mouse.
The rest of the set
⌃⌘V pastes the next Stack item. When you have collected several things in order, this press unloads them one at a time. Set an after-paste key and the cursor advances between fields on its own.
⇧⌘V pastes plain text. No fonts, no colours, no background from the source page. This is the one I use most outside the popup, because pasted formatting is the most common thing people ask a clipboard manager to fix.
⌥⌘C saves to Favorites. Point at an item, press it, and the item is copied into the Favorites folder for later. Removing it again happens from inside that folder.
⌘⌫ deletes. One shortcut for deleting in every list, so there is nothing to remember per surface.
⌥⌘P pins an open popup. It keeps the panel on screen when you release the modifiers, which is what you want while reading through a long history. Press it with the popup closed and nothing happens. It will not summon the popup, on purpose, because a pin shortcut that also opens things turns into a second launch key by accident.
The trap
Hold-to-paste needs Accessibility permission, since pasting into another app means sending a keystroke to that app. Klipto asks for it once and shows you where to drag the icon. Without it the item still reaches your clipboard and a manual ⌘V works, so nothing is lost while you decide.
The other trap is shortcut collision. Every keyboard-first app wants the same handful of combinations, so check your existing bindings before you add four more.
Neighbours worth having
Raycast handles launching, window management and commands from the keyboard, and its clipboard history is free and decent. Homerow is the one I recommend for clicking things without a mouse: it labels every link and button on screen so you can jump to one by typing. Neither replaces the other, and all three let you rebind their shortcuts, which is how you keep them out of each other's way.
Klipto free gives you the popup with your last five items and pasting from it. Search, preview and the Stack are Pro, which is $19.99 once with updates included and a 14-day trial. For a free keyboard-driven history with no queue, Maccy is 1.6 MB and open source.