PasteJump 2026.1.0.229

The first stable release. Six pre-releases, a run of real bugs found by using it daily, and every one of them fixed and covered by a test. This is the same program 2026.1-pre6 was, with the pre-release label taken off.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. No window, no mouse, no hands leaving the keyboard. That gesture is the whole of the idea; everything else exists to support it.

The website shows it in a minute. The manual is readable on GitHub as well as shipping inside the program, and there is an architecture reference if you want to see how it works.

Which download

File	What is in it	Needs
PasteJump-2026.1.0.229-win-x64.zip	PasteJump.exe, the manual, the licence and the readme — four files, no runtime to install. Portable: its data folder appears beside the executable, so a USB stick carries your history with it.	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.229-win-x64-unpacked.zip	The same build with the runtime already unpacked. Starts about four times faster warm (~0.3 s against ~1.3 s).	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.229-win-x64-net10.zip	PasteJump's own files only, 15 of them, 3.2 MB.	.NET 10 Desktop Runtime

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself. The same files are mirrored, byte for byte, to SourceForge.

What PasteJump does

• The gesture. Ctrl+V steps back through the clip stack with a small overlay showing what you are about to paste. Release Ctrl and it pastes. Nothing to learn beyond the chord you already use.
• Search without leaving the keyboard. Press F mid-gesture and type; the stack narrows as you go. No letter is an action while you are typing a query.
• Every clipboard format is kept, so a paste into Word arrives as it left Word, and an Excel range pastes back into Excel with its formatting intact — 24 of 25 formats byte-identical on a real Excel round trip, the one difference being a locale field Windows regenerates itself.
• Pin what you reach for, filter the stack by kind, mark several clips and paste them joined.
• A history window with full-text search over everything you have copied, image previews that zoom and pan, and per-row actions.
• Nineteen themes, or write your own — a theme is a small JSON file of named colours, and a three-line one that recolours the accent is legal and complete.
• Portable, and yours. One executable, no installer, no account, no network except when you ask it to check for updates.

Since 2026.1-pre6

Nothing in the program. This release exists to stop being a pre-release: with a stable release published, the Stable update channel — the default — finally has something to find, so an existing copy will now be told when a new version is out.

Everything else in this release is described in the pre-release notes: pre6 brought the working update check, update channels and the Credits window; pre3 carried the bulk of the bug fixes.

Honest about what is not verified

Everything below is tested by 1130 automated tests, a UI harness that renders every window in both themes, and daily use on one machine. Three things rest on that daily use rather than on a measurement, and are worth knowing:

• Multi-monitor mixed-DPI placement of the overlay has not been measured, because both monitors on the development machine report the same scaling.
• Focus retention across a wide range of applications is verified by use, not by instrumentation.
• Shift+Insert, the documented way to coexist with another clipboard manager, is a different chord and a few applications bind it elsewhere.

Known limitation worth reading if you are on a managed machine

On some corporate machines, endpoint data-loss-prevention policy routes one application's keyboard input — a browser, usually — through a component with more privilege than PasteJump has. Windows then hides that input from PasteJump's keyboard hook by design, and Ctrl+V does nothing in that one application while working everywhere else. Copying keeps working, which makes it look like a PasteJump fault.

It is not one, and no version of this program can work around it: a low-level hook, raw input, a registered hotkey and injected keystrokes were all measured equally blind there, and three unrelated programs — including the original Clipjump — fail identically in the same application. Ticking Always Run as Administrator restores it. Failing that, the clipboard history window is unaffected — press Copy there and paste with your own Ctrl+V. See Troubleshooting.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. That is a deliberate, settled decision rather than an oversight: a signature that fails to validate looks worse than none at all. The SHA256 of each file:

26600c8f1f4b890fb6eba2c111f3917b486e34346cee7af2097a8450ae4f505d  PasteJump-2026.1.0.229-win-x64-net10.zip
1ec43b9d652a125e355bffeb3650a597271833fef263d219f11e4c1f32f97f88  PasteJump-2026.1.0.229-win-x64-unpacked.zip
33ba0351dd8b8cb6c00ba2fe64362ea210cc3fb9bb19e5f6a976e05f33569940  PasteJump-2026.1.0.229-win-x64.zip

PasteJump 2026.1.0.226

Still a pre-release, and still for trying rather than relying on. It has been used daily on one machine by one person. The headline for this one: Check for Updates actually works now — it never could before, and this build is the first that can tell you a newer one exists.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. The website shows it in a minute; the manual is readable here on GitHub as well as shipping with the program, and there is an architecture reference if you want to see how it works.

Which download

File	What is in it	Needs
PasteJump-2026.1.0.226-win-x64.zip	One PasteJump.exe. Portable — its data folder appears beside it, so a USB stick carries your history with it.	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.226-win-x64-unpacked.zip	The same build with the runtime already unpacked. Starts about four times faster warm (~0.3 s against ~1.3 s).	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.226-win-x64-net10.zip	PasteJump's own files only, 15 of them, 3.2 MB.	.NET 10 Desktop Runtime

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself.

Check for Updates works, and there is a channel to choose

It has never once been able to find a release. Two faults, either fatal on its own, both fixed here:

• It asked GitHub for the latest release, an endpoint that excludes pre-releases by definition — and every PasteJump release is a pre-release, so GitHub answered 404. The dialog then said "No releases have been published yet", which was true the day it was written and false from the first release onwards.
• Even given a release, it compared the tag. 2026.1-pre5 reads as 2026.1.0.0, which is never newer than a running 2026.1.0.223, so the comparison could not fire even when the fetch worked. The version now comes from the archive's own name, which carries the build number.

Update Channel, under Settings, System, decides what you are offered:

Channel	What it offers
Stable	Published releases not marked pre-release. The default — and while PasteJump is in pre-release it has nothing to offer, which it now says honestly instead of claiming nothing is published.
Stable (delayed 1 week)	The same, held back until a release is seven days old, so somebody else meets a bad one first.
Developer	Every published release, pre-releases included. This is the one to choose today.

Drafts are never offered on any channel. Nothing is ever downloaded or installed for you — the check reports, and opens the release page if you want it.

Also new

• About has a Credits button. It opens the credits and the third-party notices: what PasteJump is made of, and the licences that travel with it. Clipjump is deliberately not in that list, because none of it is in this program — it is in the credits as an acknowledgement instead, which is where a debt of ideas belongs.
• The manual reads in a column instead of running the full width of the browser, which is hard to read on a wide monitor. It now sits in the same centred column the front page always used, both on the website and in the copy inside the program.
• The author's name in About links to lokeshgovindu.github.io rather than to a GitHub profile.

Nothing about the gesture itself changed. If you skipped straight here, the 2026.1-pre3 notes are the ones describing the current behaviour — a run of real fixes found by using it.

Known limitation worth reading if you are on a managed machine

On some corporate machines, endpoint data-loss-prevention policy routes one application's keyboard input — a browser, usually — through a component with more privilege than PasteJump has. Windows then hides that input from PasteJump's keyboard hook by design, and Ctrl+V does nothing in that one application while working everywhere else. Copying keeps working, which makes it look like a PasteJump fault.

It is not one, and no version of this program can work around it: a low-level hook, raw input, a registered hotkey and injected keystrokes were all measured equally blind there, and three unrelated programs fail identically in the same application. Ticking Always Run as Administrator restores it. Failing that, the clipboard history window is unaffected — press Copy there and paste with your own Ctrl+V. See Troubleshooting.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. The SHA256 of each file:

f9d0d16ba2cfc704895efddac3c1e92a6d14715b809fa4daf7a91c2711089790  PasteJump-2026.1.0.226-win-x64-net10.zip
51f1791a71eec9b058b169b9530d764fe0ee580b4091f2022fb27dae7632f23e  PasteJump-2026.1.0.226-win-x64-unpacked.zip
ca3ace42cb5f09089cac0e455ee84d67972a0e7b14050751c3b76bf90ec5acc6  PasteJump-2026.1.0.226-win-x64.zip

PasteJump 2026.1.0.210 - third pre-release

Still a pre-release, and still for trying rather than relying on. It has been used daily on one machine by one person. What this build is for is that a run of real bugs found by using it are fixed — several of them cases of the program doing something with a clip nobody chose, which is the class that matters most in a clipboard manager.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. The website shows it in a minute; the manual is readable here on GitHub as well as shipping with the program, and there is now an architecture reference if you want to see how it works.

Which download

File	What is in it	Needs
PasteJump-2026.1.0.210-win-x64.zip	One PasteJump.exe. Portable — its data folder appears beside it, so a USB stick carries your history with it.	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.210-win-x64-unpacked.zip	The same build with the runtime already unpacked, 254 files. Starts about four times faster warm (~0.3 s against ~1.3 s).	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.210-win-x64-net10.zip	PasteJump's own files only, 15 of them, 3.1 MB.	.NET 10 Desktop Runtime

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself.

Fixed since 2026.1-pre2

• The overlay sometimes opened on a bare V. Ctrl was tracked from key events, so a release that never reached us — a UAC prompt, a lock, another program's hook — left it stuck down, after which the trigger key opened the gesture on its own and took an unmodified letter away from whatever you were typing into. All four modifiers are now read live from the keyboard.
• Typing in the search box fired actions. Pressing F and typing output opened the clip in an editor, because holding Ctrl is what keeps the gesture open and the guard was "unless Ctrl is held". While the search box is up, no letter and no digit is an action; the arrows step through matches.
• The overlay appeared on the wrong monitor. It anchored to the mouse pointer when an application exposed no text caret — which is most of them, every browser included — so it could be 1,900 pixels from the window you were pasting into. It now centres on that window, and steps aside into a corner for surfaces Windows draws above everything, such as the Start menu.
• Pasting could end with a "Same as the last copy" notice, and a paste could be stored back as a new clip. Both were the same shape of fault: a clipboard write does not read back as what was written, because Windows regenerates the derived text formats from the pasting thread's locale. Recognising our own writes no longer depends on those.
• One copy became two clips, or announced itself as a repeat. An OLE writer publishes in two steps and some applications publish again a fifth of a second later with more formats; the second publish now enriches the clip in place, silently.
• A closing application announced a repeat copy. Rendering its formats on the way out republishes byte-identical content, and only the clipboard's owner tells that from somebody copying again.
• A screenshot could be stored as an 8-byte binary clip, from reading the clipboard between an OLE writer announcing its data and rendering it.
• Ctrl+V could silently stop working until PasteJump was restarted, if Windows dropped the keyboard hook — which it does, without telling anyone, when a callback exceeds its deadline. A watchdog now repairs the hook and releases a stranded overlay.
• The history window's picture preview was blurry at 100%, its scroll bars did not respond to the mouse, and image clips in the Clips view never previewed at all.

New in this build

• Where the overlay appears is yours to choose — beside the caret, centred on the window, at the pointer, or a fixed point — with a Show Me button that puts it there. The copy notification has the same choice, separately.
• The overlay says when the clip was copied, at the right of its facts row, in your own Windows date and time format.
• Its font can be chosen, labels and clip text together.
• The tray menu has two ticked toggles: Run at Startup, and Always Run as Administrator — the second registers a logon task, and exists for the case below.
• PasteJump says when it cannot see the keyboard in one program, once, naming it, instead of leaving Ctrl+V looking broken there.
• The history window filters by kind, gives every row a right-click menu, remembers its size and its splitter, and says what a delete removed.
• A magnifier in every search box, a GitHub Dark theme to pair with GitHub Light, and an animated tour of the gesture inside the help file.
• Two logs that ship: logs\gesture.log records what the hook received and what the recognizer did with it, and logs\capture.log one line per capture decision. They are what made most of the fixes above findable.

Known limitation worth reading if you are on a managed machine

On some corporate machines, endpoint data-loss-prevention policy routes one application's keyboard input — a browser, usually — through a component with more privilege than PasteJump has. Windows then hides that input from PasteJump's keyboard hook by design, and Ctrl+V does nothing in that one application while working everywhere else. Copying keeps working, which makes it look like a PasteJump fault.

It is not one, and no version of this program can work around it: a low-level hook, raw input, a registered hotkey and injected keystrokes were all measured equally blind there, and three unrelated programs fail identically in the same application. Ticking Always Run as Administrator restores it. Failing that, the clipboard history window is unaffected — press Copy there and paste with your own Ctrl+V. See Troubleshooting.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. The SHA256 of each file:

82fd4a4ebbee3522f435ab2e405f0378a5c740d579a66d4d4675456bf3205957  PasteJump-2026.1.0.210-win-x64.zip
815fd284787058419265138ab49a9bbd6f5f27249901b5525f431be8f54a83c7  PasteJump-2026.1.0.210-win-x64-unpacked.zip
0a2129ae801afa7ef6c088dba3086ebc4bcd88b13d69033c5d4d58e84aa08e4b  PasteJump-2026.1.0.210-win-x64-net10.zip

PasteJump 2026.1.0.155 - second pre-release

Still a pre-release, and still for trying rather than relying on. It has been used daily on one machine by one person. What this build is for is that several things that were wrong in 2026.1-pre1 are fixed — three of them found by using it.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. The website shows it in a minute; the manual is now readable here on GitHub as well as shipping with the program.

Which download

File	What is in it	Needs
PasteJump-2026.1.0.155-win-x64.zip	One PasteJump.exe. Portable — its data folder appears beside it, so a USB stick carries your history with it.	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.155-win-x64-unpacked.zip	The same build with the runtime already unpacked, 254 files. Starts about four times faster warm (~0.3 s against ~1.3 s).	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.155-win-x64-net10.zip	PasteJump's own files only, 15 of them, 2.8 MB.	.NET 10 Desktop Runtime

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself.

Fixed since 2026.1-pre1

Three of these were reported from real use, and each was a case of the program doing something with a clip the user had not chosen — the class of bug that matters most in a clipboard manager.

• Releasing Ctrl after Delete pasted the wrong clip. Deleting leaves the cursor where it was and the clip below moves up under it, so releasing pasted that one, into whatever you were editing. Deleting now pastes nothing on release, and the overlay says DELETED for a moment. Step to another clip and releasing pastes again, so "delete this one, paste that one" still works in one gesture.
• The image preview showed the wrong picture, or none. With the kind filter or a search active, the overlay resolved the clip by position against the unfiltered store — so "clip 7" of the images was really stack position 31. Where that slot held text the preview vanished; where it held a different image, you saw that one. The frame now names its clip by id.
• Image clips never previewed in the history window's Clips view. A clip keeps the clipboard formats it was copied with rather than a blob, and the preview pane only looked for a blob — so every image clip showed [image] where the picture should be.
• The paste-mode key card (F1) opened without the keyboard, so it ignored Esc and every other key until it was clicked.

New in this build

• The image preview zooms and pans. Fit by default, then 100%, −, +, Ctrl+scroll to zoom around the pointer, drag to pan, double-click to toggle, 0 and 1 on the keyboard.
• The tray menu follows your theme and has icons. It was the one surface that stayed light on all nineteen themes.
• A chip that shows cycling state names its key — Original (Z), images only (K) — so the overlay says how to change what it is showing.
• Tidier history window: vertical column rules, columns sized from measured text, the preview pane given half the window, and image rows show a thumbnail when you hover them.
• Marking clips to join is now switched off by default. It cost a letter in the overlay's hint and a row on the key card for something most people never use; give it any free letter under Settings → Keys to turn it on. Joining by selecting rows in the history window is unchanged.
• The manual is now Markdown as well as HTML, generated from the same source, so it can be read in the repository.
• CI: every push builds, runs 902 tests and renders every window on a clean machine.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. The SHA256 of each file:

e068fdf698c83a9948f3169e62b30e0f30e6f074f95a6cc4ac76ec14a4504126  PasteJump-2026.1.0.155-win-x64.zip
28d986226c486d246a5b2e2fb5b8c4406146828954914cb08c4e0efa8b49a0bc  PasteJump-2026.1.0.155-win-x64-unpacked.zip
b5c228ea1524179ade690cb4e84199c67385575fb484596d820182360a6058fe  PasteJump-2026.1.0.155-win-x64-net10.zip

Known limitations

• Two settings are greyed out: the trigger letter and the keystroke sent to paste. Neither is required for normal use.
• Running alongside another clipboard manager that also claims Ctrl+V does not work — one of the two has to be closed. PasteJump warns at start-up when it recognises one.
• Not tested on a mixed-DPI desktop. Overlay placement across monitors at different scales is unverified.
• Windows on ARM is not built. 64-bit x86 only.
• No installer in this build: the ZIPs are the whole release.

Privacy

Everything stays in a SQLite database in your own folder. No telemetry, no account, and no network call except an optional check for a newer release on GitHub. It is a clipboard manager, so it sees what you copy — the source is here to read, and the exclusion list is there for the things you would rather it did not.

MIT licensed. Reports and suggestions are welcome in Issues — the three fixes at the top of this list came from exactly that.

PasteJump 2026.1 - first pre-release

The first public build of PasteJump. Marked a pre-release deliberately: it has been used daily on one machine and tested by one person, so please treat it as something to try rather than something to rely on.

Hold Ctrl, tap V to walk back through what you have copied, release to paste. No window, no mouse. The website shows it in a minute; the manual is the long version.

Which download

File	What is in it	Needs
PasteJump-2026.1.0.134-win-x64.zip	One PasteJump.exe. Portable — its data folder appears beside it, so a USB stick carries your history with it.	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.134-win-x64-unpacked.zip	The same build with the runtime already unpacked, 254 files. Starts about four times faster (~0.3 s against ~1.3 s warm).	Nothing
PasteJump-2026.1.0.134-win-x64-net10.zip	PasteJump's own files only, 15 of them, 2.8 MB.	.NET 10 Desktop Runtime

Take the first unless you have a reason not to. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside the folder you unzip into, unless you move the data location yourself.

Windows will warn you

This build is not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen will report an unknown publisher on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. The SHA256 of each file is below if you want to check that what you downloaded is what was published:

b5c5ed50bb1f82a890f88abcdc382ab4064986f8019dc3ac1c97644841d55980  PasteJump-2026.1.0.134-win-x64.zip
d2d538a4eed1563db4f86d0e11d1944e75da364430f72b42d0936d5808cca3f7  PasteJump-2026.1.0.134-win-x64-unpacked.zip
b65fe9e4ea8eee3dfd4ef2d83edecba635edb2972b7521ba13238b9d7a562bdd  PasteJump-2026.1.0.134-win-x64-net10.zip

What it does

• The gesture. V and C step, A/Home returns to the newest clip, 1–9 jump, Esc cancels and restores the previous clipboard. Every letter can be moved or switched off; the arrows, Home, End, Delete, Esc and F1 never move, so no set of bindings can leave you stuck. F1 shows the list.
• Two stores. A stack of clips the gesture pastes from, keeping every clipboard format — an Excel range comes back as an Excel range — and a full-text searchable history archive alongside it.
• Join several clips into one paste. J marks clips during the gesture; releasing Ctrl pastes them as one, joined by a separator you choose. Or select rows in the history window and press Copy.
• Paste formats. Z cycles Original, Plain text, Collapse whitespace, Sentence case, Unindent.
• Nineteen themes, applied as you step through the list — Solarized, Catppuccin, Nord, Dracula, Tokyo Night, Monokai, Gruvbox, Kanagawa and more — and a theme is a small JSON file you can write yourself.
• Import from Clipjump. Both its history archive and its clip stack, without modifying anything in its folder.
• Excluded applications. Password managers are excluded by default; while one is in the foreground, nothing is recorded.

Known limitations

• Two settings are greyed out: the trigger letter and the keystroke sent to paste. Both need more work before they earn a control, and neither is required for normal use.
• Running alongside another clipboard manager that also claims Ctrl+V does not work — one of the two has to be closed. PasteJump warns at start-up when it recognises one.
• Not tested on a mixed-DPI desktop. Overlay placement across monitors at different scales is unverified.
• Windows on ARM is not built. 64-bit x86 only.

Privacy

Everything stays in a SQLite database in your own folder. No telemetry, no account, and no network call except an optional check for a newer release on GitHub. It is a clipboard manager, so it sees what you copy — the source is here to read, and the exclusion list is there for the things you would rather it did not.

MIT licensed. Reports and suggestions are welcome in Issues.