Select something and ⌘C copies it, ⌘X cuts it, ⌘V pastes it. (On Windows and Linux, Ctrl.) It is the clipboard you already know, and it behaves the way you would expect it to.
It is the real clipboard
The elements go on your operating system's clipboard, not a private one inside the page. That is what makes the useful cases work:
- paste into another tab of the same diagram,
- paste into a different diagram entirely,
- paste into a second browser window you have the editor open in,
- copy, reload the page, and paste what you copied before the reload.
A copy carries the elements' styling, their labels, their links and notes, and the arrows between them. Ids are re-minted on arrival and pinned arrows are re-wired to the copies, so pasting into a diagram that already holds the originals gives you a genuinely separate set rather than two names for one thing.
What paste does
The pasted elements land offset from the original, not exactly on top of it, so you can see what arrived and drag it where it belongs. They come in selected, ready to be moved as one.
Cut is copy plus delete, in a single undo step, so an undo after a cut puts the originals back where they were.
A paste onto a tab you cannot edit does nothing: a view-only share link has no writing in it, and that includes writing by clipboard.
Pasting a screenshot
If what you have on the clipboard is an image (a screenshot, or an image copied from a web page) rather than elements, ⌘V drops it on the canvas as an image element and uploads it to your gallery. In an offline diagram it is embedded locally instead, so no copy leaves your machine.
Anything else on the clipboard is left alone: pasting ordinary text into a label being edited types the text, as it should.
When you just want another one
For a copy of what you already have, on the same tab, two things are quicker than the clipboard:
⌘Dduplicates the selection in place.- Shift and drag a selection drops a copy where you release it and leaves the originals put. See Duplicating Elements.
Building the same cluster on several tabs? Build it once, copy it, and paste it into each. It is the fastest route to a set of tabs that genuinely match, and every copy is independent afterwards.
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