Tutorials & screencasts · June 11, 2026 · Vincent Mary

Record video tutorials without copy-paste pauses

If you record tutorials — for your students, your clients, or YouTube — you know the moment: you need to type a name, an instruction, a code snippet. You pause the recording, hunt for the text, paste it, resume. Ten times per video. Here is how to remove those pauses for good.

What pauses really cost

Every pause breaks three things at once. Your speaking rhythm, first: viewers hear the restart, the breath, the "so, um, as I was saying". Your editing, second: every cut is one more edit point, and a 10-minute video can pile up thirty of them. Your focus, third: while you dig through your notes, you lose the thread of your own demonstration.

In fifteen years of teaching, I have seen (and tried) every workaround: the text file open on a second screen, digital sticky notes, the clipboard manager you rummage through live. They all share the same flaw: they ask you to search for the right text at the exact moment you should be talking.

The principle: prepare a queue, not a history

The fix is not a better clipboard history. It is the opposite: a queue of snippets prepared in advance, in script order. Like a teleprompter — except instead of scrolling text to read, it advances text to paste.

The method takes three steps:

1 · Script your pastes

Before recording, walk through your outline and list everything you will need to type: file names, URLs, terminal commands, sample text, fictional student names. One line per item, in the exact order they appear. This takes five minutes and often exposes gaps in your script — a bonus, not a chore.

2 · Load the queue

Put that list into a tool that pastes blocks sequentially. That is exactly the problem I could not solve with existing tools, and the reason I ended up building CopyTuts: you import your lines, activate the list with a shortcut, and every Cmd+V pastes the next block. The menu bar always shows the upcoming snippet and your progress ("3/12"), so you know where you are without leaving the screen you are recording.

3 · Record in one take

Hit record and go. When a field needs filling: Cmd+V, and you keep talking. No pause, no searching, no window switching. A 10-minute video records in 10 minutes — and editing comes down to trimming the start and the end.

Three details that change everything

Loop your demo lists. If you repeat the same sequence several times (say, to show one manipulation from several angles), a list that wraps back to the first block saves you from reloading it.

One list per video, not one giant list. The "I'll put everything in one list" reflex always ends with pasting the wrong block. One list = one recording.

Keep your hands on the mouse. With a Stream Deck, one key activates the list and another pastes the current block — handy when your demo already occupies the keyboard. CopyTuts has a dedicated plugin for this, including dial scrolling on the Stream Deck +.

Not on a Mac?

The principle still holds: prepare your snippets in order, number them, and use whatever sequential-paste tool exists on your platform. It is the method — scripting your pastes before recording — that saves the time. The tool just removes the friction.

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