When CyberMatrix released Clipboard Magic 4 it was one of the better clipboard managers around, effortlessly capturing every text item copied to your clipboard and retaining them in a list for easy re-use later.

That was back in 2005, of course, and the intervening years have seen several significant issues appear with the program. If you’ve used it in the past, though, or just need a clipboard extension tool right now, then the good news is that CyberMatrix have finally released the first beta of Clipboard Magic 5.0 – and it’s packed with fixes and valuable new features.

This kind of tool can often produce very lengthy lists of clipped text, for instance. So Clipboard Magic 5.0 can now help you to organise them by giving individual clips labels and names, or colour-coding them, enabling you to spot related clips at a glance.

Whatever text you copy to the clipboard - a character, or a page - is saved for easy reuse later

The program always allowed you to save your list of clips to files, for easy reuse later – but what if you forget? Clipboard Magic 5.0 can now automatically save your clipboard history, so even if your PC crashes you should still find your text items available when you next reboot.

If you regularly work with clips in multiple languages then you’ll appreciate the program’s new Unicode support.

Clipboard Magic 5.0 gains many new configuration options, including the ability to customise its toolbar to suit your needs.

And some long-standing problems have finally been slain. So you should no longer have problems copying text greater than 32KB in length, for instance. And if another app has locked the clipboard then Clipboard Magic will no longer give up immediately with an annoying error message; it’ll just try again a few more times, and the chances are that one of those will be successful.

Clipboard Magic remains completely free, though, and lightweight, with the base program typically requiring well under 1MB RAM on our test PC. It’s a beta, so you shouldn’t expect complete reliability, but the program behaved well in our tests: if you’re looking for a text-based clipboard manager then this one is well worth a few minutes of your time.