The clipboard is one of the revolutionary features of the IT age that cannot be praised enough: users highlight a specific piece of information, such as a paragraph of text, an image or a fragment of audio, and select “Copy” from the Edit menu. The “Insert” command then brings this information into a second document, also in a different program. This mechanism saves users a lot of work. The only hurdle: The Mac clipboard only remembers one piece of content. With the release of Mac OS 7.5 in 1994, Apple wanted to remedy the situation using text clips: If you drag selected text onto the desktop with the mouse, a small file is created. This can then be dragged into any document that accepts text. A visual template management system that can be organized using the Finder was created. This still works today – but with some limitations. In the following years, text clippings (in German: text clips) were supplemented by two special forms, explains Howard Oakley in his current blog post: If you drag internet or email addresses into a Finder window or onto the desk, a web or email location is created (.webloc or .mailloc). Although these formats originated in classic MacOS, this works up to macOS 26 (Tahoe).
Text clips first appeared in macOS 7.5.
Format change
When switching from the classic Mac OS to the UNIX-based MacOS this no longer played a role in Mac OS X. That’s why the content was also stored in plist format in the data area (data fork). Recently, Apple changed the format again: Content is now included as a binary property list (bplist). In a follow-up article, Oakley takes a closer look at how the resource part, which is now housed in the extended attributes, and the data part of text clips with the same content are structured.
In macOS 26 (Tahoe) text clips, weblocs and maillocs (from left to right) are still available.
Solve problems with old clippings
Anyone who reanimates an old Mac and transfers its files to newer devices may encounter problems with a historical clip inventory: Oakley reports that snippets created before 2015 no longer work in current systems. In this case, he recommends first checking the file size: as long as it is larger than 0 kilobytes, there is hope. In this case, users should drag the clipping onto an empty TextEdit window. Alternatively, opening the clipping file with BEdit or another text editor will most likely be successful. The Finder overview (select a file and press the space bar) can often reveal content.
Last resort Xcode
If these methods fail, what remains is a command line tool called DeRez that is integrated into Xcode. Anyone who has installed Apple’s free development environment can attempt to recover the content buried in the fork resource using a terminal command:
DeRez Clip > Clip content.txt
This command writes the contents of a file named “Clip” in the current directory to a new text file named “Clipcontent.txt.” Multiple versions of the same content often appear in both binary and plain text format. In TextEdit you can extract the content of narrow, multi-line content quite easily:
- Scroll to the area headed “data ‘utf8′”.
- Move the mouse cursor to the beginning of the text area, past the comment identifier “/* “.
- Hold the -key pressed – the mouse pointer turns into a crosshair
- Click and drag the mouse pointer to the bottom of the text column to select the area across rows.
- Select “Copy” from the Edit menu (shortcut key +C).
Some post-processing of the copied text content is still necessary. For example, you have to remove the many line transitions and possibly replace incorrect special characters.
The content extracted via terminal command can be easily marked in TextEdit by holding down the option key.
