If you’re a Chrome user, you know how to enable clipboard sharing in the browser. But what if you want to share a clipboard with others, but don’t want to use the Google Drive integration? Here’s how to do it in Google Chrome.
- Open Chrome and sign in with your Google account.
- Click on the three lines in the top left corner of the browser window and select “New Tab.”
- Type “clipboard” into the text field and click on the “Create New Tab” button.
- In the new tab, type “google drive” into the text field and click on the “Create New Tab” button again.
- In both tabs, select “Share Clipboard.”
- Click on the “Share Clipboard” button at the top of each tab and enter a name for your clipboard (e.g., my_clipboard).
Much like Google Chrome’s Send Tab to Self feature, you can use a similar hidden flag to highlight and copy text to another device’s clipboard. Here’s how you can enable clipboard sharing across devices in Chrome.
How Clipboard Sharing Works
Once you’ve enabled the flag, you’ll find a new “Copy to your device” option when you right-click highlighted text on a web page. It’ll list all the devices with the flag enabled that you’re signed into with your Google account—on Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android. Select a device to send text directly to its clipboard.
Like all flags in Chrome, this is a feature that’s still a work-in-progress. It can change or disappear from the flags page altogether at any time. Google may soon release this as a stable feature that doesn’t require a flag in the future. However, the beta feature is available now in the stable version of Google Chrome 79.
RELATED: What’s New in Chrome 79, Available Now
How to Enable Clipboard Sharing
This hidden feature is available as a flag. To find it, open a new tab, paste chrome://flags into Chrome’s Omnibox and then press the Enter key. Search for “Clipboard” in the search box.
You’ll see three separate flags. Each flag handles a different part of this feature and needs to be enabled to function correctly.
Note: On Android, you will only see the “Enable receiver device to handle shared clipboard feature” and “Enable shared clipboard feature signals to be handled” flags.
When you’re done, click the “Relaunch Now” button to restart your Chrome browser with the flags enabled.
Repeat this process on all devices that you use Chrome as a browser and want to copy text onto the device’s clipboard.
How to Copy Text Between Devices
After enabling the flags and restarting your web browser, you’ll be able to access the feature from the right-click context menu.
Highlight some text from a web page and right-click on it to display the context menu. Click “Copy to your devices” and choose a device from the list.
You’ll see a small notification in the Omnibox when you send some text to the other device.
A notification will appear on the other device, too.
After copying the text copied to the device, right-click—or long-press on Android—and choose “Paste,” like you would with anything on the clipboard.
If you don’t see one of your devices in the list here, ensure it’s running the latest version of Google Chrome with these flags enabled and that you’re signed in to the same Google account on all of your devices.
Other features are available via Chrome Flags, too. We’ve put together a list of the best Chrome flags to enable for better browsing that you can check out.
RELATED: The Best Chrome Flags to Enable for Better Browsing