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 document,
- paste into a different document 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 very large copy (over 2,000 elements) is too big for the system clipboard: it pastes only in the window you copied it in, and a message says so.
A copy carries the elements' styling, their labels, their links and notes, and any arrows you selected along with them (a marquee picks up the arrows inside it; Shift-click them to include them by hand). Pasted on the same tab, the arrows between the copied elements come along even if you didn't select them. It deliberately leaves behind what belongs to the original's conversation: comments, assigned actions, and votes or poll answers. Ids are re-minted on arrival and pinned arrows are re-wired to the copies, so pasting into a document 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's position (a little down and to the right), not exactly on top of it, so you can see what arrived and drag it where it belongs. That holds in another tab or document too, so if the copy isn't in view, it is where the original sat. They come in selected, ready to be moved as one.
Without a keyboard, Paste is also the first row under the icon toolbar when you right-click (or long-press) empty canvas, and an icon in a tab's menu. See Context Menus. The menu's Paste uses what you copied in this window; something copied in another window or before a reload pastes with ⌘V.
Cut is copy plus delete: the originals go as soon as you cut, and an undo puts them back where they were. Locked elements are copied but stay where they are.
Copy, cut and paste are for editors. On a view-only or Participant share link they do nothing, and a paste onto a tab you cannot edit does nothing either.
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 document it is embedded locally instead, so no copy leaves your machine.
Copied from Excalidraw? An Excalidraw copy (or a .excalidraw file) pastes as a scene of livediagram elements, in one undo step.
Anything else on the clipboard is left alone. Pasting ordinary text into a label being edited types the text, as it should; ordinary text pasted onto the canvas itself does nothing.
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, offset from the original.- 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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