Clipboard Manager: pasting multiple items sends ⌘V + Return per item instead of one paste (submits inputs, conflicts with ⌘ triggers)

Bugs or Unexpected Behavior
1

Describe the bug
When I select several items in the Clipboard Manager and press Return, BTT pastes them one at a time. It seems to simulate ⌘V followed by Return for each item (⌘V, Return, ⌘V, Return, ⌘V, Return …), I assume to put each item on a new line.

This causes two problems:

  1. The Return presses break any input that submits on Return. In a search box, chat box, or any text field where Return means "send" or "submit", the first item gets pasted and immediately sent. Then BTT pastes the next item into the now-empty field and sends that too, and so on. So instead of pasting all items into one message, each item is sent separately.
  2. The repeated ⌘ presses clash with other triggers that use ⌘. In my setup I have a trigger that launches an app when I double-press ⌘. When I paste two or more items from the Clipboard Manager, that trigger can fire in the middle of the paste and the app launches.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Copy three short pieces of text.
  2. Open a text field where Return submits (e.g. a chat input or a browser search field).
  3. Open the Clipboard Manager, select all three items, and press Return.
  4. The first item is pasted and submitted, then the second, then the third, instead of all three being pasted together.

For the ⌘ conflict: create a trigger that runs an action when ⌘ is pressed twice quickly (e.g. launch an app), then paste multiple items as above. The trigger can fire during the paste.

Expected behavior
All selected items should be pasted at once with a single paste (one ⌘V, no simulated Return), in the order they were selected, for example joined by a new line inside the pasted text. This is how other clipboard managers with multi-select that I've tried handle it. It avoids both submitting half-finished input and sending repeated ⌘ presses that other triggers can pick up.

If some people rely on the current one-by-one behavior, an option like "Paste multiple items as: one combined paste / one by one" (maybe with a choice of separator) would solve it for everyone.

Affected input device: Keyboard (Clipboard Manager paste)

Screenshots
N/A

Device information:

  • Type of Mac: Mac mini (Apple Silicon)
  • macOS version: 27.0.1
  • BetterTouchTool version: latest release (6.943 or newer)

Additional information
Related: in this thread it was mentioned that multiple selected items are pasted sequentially. This report is about the side effects of that approach.

2

this sounds easy but is really hard to implement generically and also not always desirable. Clipboard content consists of many things and is not designed to be merged, thus BTT can only paste one by one.

However you can easily create a custom clipboard content transformer that does this, e.g. if you need it only for plain strings. Here is a simple example that uses a minus sign as separator:

image
image1920×1609 185 KB

Custom clipboard transformers can have keyboard shortcuts and you can show them in the bottom menu:

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image1840×1384 183 KB
#

Here is the example transformer:

merge_transformer.bttpreset (26.6 KB)

async (clipboardContentString) => {
    //example join with -
   return clipboardContentString.join("-")
}