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Show Universal Clipboard (iPhone) items at the top of the stack with an "Import" action

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Problem

When I copy something on my iPhone, Universal Clipboard puts it on my Mac’s pasteboard. Paste ignores it. ⌘V pastes the iPhone content, but the top of the Paste stack still shows my previous Mac item. For up to two minutes the stack and the actual clipboard disagree, and the iPhone item never lands in history unless I re-copy it on the Mac.

Why Paste skips it (as far as I can tell)

The pasteboard item carries the type com.apple.is-remote-clipboard. It’s a promise: only the type list is present, and the data is transferred from the iPhone the moment an app reads it. Skipping it makes sense — reading it would trigger a transfer every time I copy on my phone.

But the item can still be shown without being read:

  • The type list is available without triggering a transfer.
  • After about two minutes the system removes the promise and restores the previous local item (changeCount even goes back to the old value). The marker disappears with it.
  • Pasting with ⌘V fills the data but does not bump changeCount, so Paste never gets a second chance to see it.

Proposal

Don’t store it. Just surface it.

  1. While the marker is present, show a transient banner at the top of the stack: “iPhone clipboard — Import” (type icons from the type list are enough; no preview needed).
  2. Clicking Import reads the data (this is the one intentional transfer), rewrites it as a normal local item, and saves it to history like any other copy.
  3. When the marker disappears (expiry, or a new copy), the banner disappears.

Optional: a setting “Automatically import Universal Clipboard items” for people who accept the transfer cost.

Why this matters

Right now the fix is “open Paste on the iPhone and wait for iCloud sync,” which is slow, or “paste on the Mac and copy it again,” which is silly. A banner keeps Paste’s storage model intact and closes the gap between what the stack shows and what ⌘V actually pastes.

Tested on macOS 27.0 with Paste 6 (Setapp). Happy to share details.

an hour ago