A clipboard history manager built into a radial menu

Every Mac clipboard manager is some shape of list. Hit a hotkey, see a panel, scan the rows, click or arrow-key to the one you want. The good ones (Paste, Raycast, Maccy) are tuned to make that loop quick — but the loop itself is the same: panel, scan, pick.

That works. It also burns a beat of attention each time. You stop typing, you read, you hunt, you click, you resume. The ergonomic cost isn't the time — it's the context-switch.

A radial menu changes the shape. Your last clip lives at North; the one before it, North-East; the one before that, East. You flick. You don't scan. The clip is back on your pasteboard before you've stopped looking at the document you were typing in.

How the radial clipboard works in Swik

Swik watches the system pasteboard in the background. Whenever you copy text, the new clip is added to the front of an 8-deep history. Older clips push down; duplicates collapse to the most recent occurrence.

You assign a wedge to Clipboard History. When you flick to it, that wedge opens a sub-ring of the eight most recent clips, each labeled with its first line (truncated to about 30 characters so the wedges stay readable). Flick toward the one you want, release, and Swik writes it back to the pasteboard and pastes it into whatever app you're in.

There's no panel. There's no scrolling. The whole interaction is hold-flick-flick-release.

Why eight

The cap on the history is deliberate. Eight is roughly the most the human hand can find by direction without the wedges getting too narrow to flick precisely. Sixteen is technically possible; thirty-two stops being a radial menu and starts being a wagon wheel.

It's also the right number for the actual job. The "things I copied recently" distribution is heavily front-loaded. The clip from two minutes ago is needed often. The clip from 90 minutes ago is needed almost never. If you're searching deep history a lot, you want a different tool — a database-backed clipboard manager with full-text search. Swik is not trying to be that tool.

What Swik is trying to be: the fastest way to get back the last 8 things you copied, with zero context-switch.

A working example

You're filling out a form. You copy your address. You tab over and the next field needs your phone number — also copied earlier. The native pasteboard only holds the address, so the phone number is gone unless you re-grab it from wherever it lives.

With a radial clipboard:

1. You copied your address last (it's at North in the history ring).
2. You copied the phone number before that (it's at North-East).
3. Click the address field, flick → North → release. Address pasted.
4. Tab to phone. Flick → North-East → release. Phone pasted.

Two flicks, both clips back, no panel in the way. Try the same flow with a system pasteboard and you'll be re-copying the phone number from a previous tab.

Pairing with the rest of the menu

Clipboard history is a sub-menu wedge, not a top-level one. That's important: you don't want one of your eight precious top-ring slots burned on a feature you use a few times an hour. You want it tucked behind a single wedge that can also live next to your app launches.

A reasonable layout looks like this:

One flick to open clipboard history. One more flick to paste a clip. Two flicks total, no keyboard needed, no panel, no read.

What's not there (and why)

Three things Swik's clipboard doesn't do:

It doesn't store images or files. The whole point is fast text recovery. Image clipboards are best handled by a dedicated tool with a thumbnail grid — a radial sub-menu of nine 30-character labels is the wrong shape for picking images.

It doesn't persist across restarts. History lives in memory only. Quit Swik and the last 8 clips are gone. This is a privacy property as much as a simplicity one — copying a password means copying it for one session, not forever.

It doesn't search. Eight items don't need search. If you find yourself wishing it did, that's a sign you want a different tool — a dedicated long-history manager — and Swik can sit happily alongside it.

The minute-by-minute version

The right way to think about a radial clipboard is as a shorter-term memory for your hands. The system pasteboard remembers one thing. Swik remembers eight, and lets your fingers find them by direction. After a few hours of use, you stop reaching for re-copy: you just flick.