What a .textClipping file is, and why one is on your desktop

A text clipping is what macOS makes when you drag selected text out of an app and drop it onto the Desktop or into a Finder window. The file is named after the first words of the text, carries the hidden extension .textClipping, and holds exactly the words you dragged. Most people who find one did not mean to make it: the drop happened by accident while they were trying to select something.

How a clipping gets made

The mechanism is ordinary drag and drop. Select some text in a web page, a note or a document. Now press on the highlighted text and move the pointer, and instead of starting a new selection, macOS picks up the selected text as something to drag. Let go over the Desktop or a Finder window, and Finder turns that text into a file.

That is why clippings appear by surprise. You meant to adjust a selection, pressed inside the highlighted part, moved a bit too far, and released over whatever was behind the window. The Desktop is a valid drop target, so the text landed there.

A couple of related files are made the same way:

• Links dragged out of a browser’s address bar or out of a page become .webloc files, which open the page when double-clicked. Getting a webloc link out of a dragged file covers those.
• Some images dragged out of certain apps arrive as a picture clipping rather than an ordinary image file, depending on what the source app offers for the drag.

Opening one and getting the text out

Double-click the clipping. It opens in a plain window that shows the text. From there:

1. Click inside the text and press Command-A to select all of it.
2. Press Command-C to copy.
3. Paste it wherever it needs to go.

In many apps you can also drag the clipping file itself into a document or a text field, and the text goes in as if you had typed it. That is what clippings were designed for: a way to keep a snippet as a file and drop it back in later. Some apps treat the clipping as an attachment instead of text; in that case, open it and copy the text out.

Turning a clipping into a normal text file

A clipping only opens properly on a Mac. If you want to keep the snippet, share it, or open it somewhere else, convert it to plain text.

1. Open the clipping, select all, and copy.
2. Open TextEdit and create a new document.
3. Choose Format > Make Plain Text, or press Shift-Command-T.
4. Paste, then choose File > Save. Name it and save it wherever it belongs. TextEdit saves plain text as a .txt file that opens anywhere.

If the snippet is really a note to yourself, paste it into your notes app instead and move the clipping to the Trash.

Stopping accidental clippings

There is no setting that turns clippings off, but a few habits stop almost all of them.

• Click before you reselect. If text is already highlighted and you want a different selection, click once somewhere else to clear it, then drag to select. Pressing inside an existing highlight is what starts a drag.
• Press Escape if you feel a drag start. In many apps, pressing Escape while you are still holding the button cancels the drag, and nothing is dropped. How to cancel a drag on a Mac before you drop it has the other ways out.
• Let go where you started. Releasing the text back over its own highlighted selection ends the drag with no change.
• Look before you let go. Releasing over Finder or the Desktop makes a clipping. If the pointer is over bare desktop, you are about to make one.

Clippings are safe to delete. Nothing else on the Mac depends on them.

Using clippings on purpose

Once you know what they are, clippings are handy. Keep a folder of snippets you paste often, such as a mailing address, a standard reply or a block of code, and drag one into a message or document when you need it. There is nothing to install; Finder has supported clippings for a very long time.

The downside is that snippets pile up wherever you drop them, and a Desktop full of clippings is hard to scan because each one is named after its first few words. A dedicated folder added to the Finder sidebar keeps them together and out of the way. In a list view, sorting by Kind groups clippings apart from everything else.

When you really wanted to hold a file or a link

Plenty of accidental clippings come from a different job entirely: you were moving something from one app to another and used the Desktop as a stopover. If what you are carrying is a file, an image or a link rather than a snippet of text, a proper stopover works better than a bare Desktop. Picking up a file now and deciding where it goes later goes into that habit.

Ledge turns the notch at the top of a MacBook screen into a shelf. Drag a file, folder, image or link up to the notch and let go; it waits there until you take it somewhere. Open the shelf with Option-Space or a click on the notch and drag the item into the app that needs it, and that app gets the form it can use: a terminal gets a path as text, Finder gets the file, and a link can become a webloc. On a Mac without a notch, the shelf sits at the top center of the screen. It works entirely on your Mac, with no account and no cloud step.

Questions

Is a .textClipping file harmful?

No. It is an ordinary Mac file holding a piece of text you dragged. Opening it shows the text, and deleting it removes nothing else.

Why can’t someone on a PC open my clipping?

Clippings are a Mac format. Copy the text out and save it as a plain text file before sending it to anyone.

Where do text clippings get saved?

Wherever the drop happened. That is usually the Desktop, and sometimes the folder shown in whichever Finder window was under the pointer when you let go.