Core Concepts
These terms show up across the feature guides—spend a minute here first and the rest reads faster.
Clipboard vs clip
- Clipboard: the system clipboard on your device.
- Clip: a transient snapshot—data read from the clipboard in one shot. Captures from other clip sources (e.g. screenshots, SMS) still appear as one row in clip history, so you can index, sync, and reuse without replacing what “system clipboard” means to the OS.
Clip history
A chronological list of clips you can browse, reuse, or delete. See Clip History overview.
Clip source
Where a clip’s data came from. Typical sources include clipboard, screenshots, and SMS. Clip Sources overview also covers paths like Share and how they interact with monitoring.
Sync
- Nearby Sync: share clips with devices on the same local network.
- Cloud Sync: sync clips across your own devices through a WebDAV / S3 storage path you configure. Clips are end-to-end encrypted on-device with a key you hold before upload, so the storage bucket only ever holds ciphertext. An anonymous notification service signals "new data ready"—it never carries your content or key.
See Sync overview. For your first cross-device copy/paste, follow Cross-device copy & paste.
Pasting into target apps
Putting a clip into the app you are using can hit app or OS limits. If history shows the clip but paste fails, see Cannot paste.
Version differences
Menus and capabilities can vary slightly by release—follow what you see in your installed app.
Next steps
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