I copy some text “John” to the system clipboard. Then I copy more text “Doe” to the system clipboard. My clipboard history now shows “Doe” as item 1 and “John” item 2. I want to paste item 2 “John” in a single keystroke. In other words, how can I paste the second item from the clipboard history with having to manually interact with the clipboard history switcher and without having to in advance send an item to a named clipboard?
The only way is to reorder the items in the clipboard history:
Set Clipboard to Past Clipboard 1
Paste
The downside of that is that obviously your previous clipboard (“Doe”) would then be in second position (past clipboard 1).
Actually that works just fine for me. I just put “Doe” back in second position like this:
Set Clipboard to Past Clipboard 1
Paste
Set Clipboard to Past Clipboard 1
Thanks for pointing out the Set Clipboard to Past Clipboard action!
Just watch out for timing issues whenever you are reordering the clipboard - setting the clipboard is a synchronous action, whereas Paste (via Command-V) is a queued action, so tis not hard for them to get out of sync if your Mac gets bogged down.
The wiki troubleshooting section Sometimes the Wrong Thing is Pasted has more info on the complexities and issues involved.