“What? I’ve never seen a program that fiddles with the clipboard. That could be catastrophic. Imagine if you’re executing a copy/paste loop in a terminal window, and ApplicationX suddenly (if only for a moment) changes the clipboard contents.”
I wrote a program that did that. It would insert “MY NAME is awesome!” into the clipboard every time the clipboard changed. So the clipboard would always contain that string. Then I installed it on my bosses computer. Hilarity ensued.
Dang, I didn’t use HTML, anyway, the string was “MY NAME is awesome!” That way anytime my boss pasted anything he would be reminded of my awesomeness.
The RIM Blackberry devices, for all their other failings, do ovver copy / paste functionality.
ovver - offer.
Strange that people suggest “install linux and a desktop suite to get an add-in it comes with so you won’t have to install one tiny add-in on the OS you work in”…
Then again, none of the Klipper screenshots suggest to me that it’s overcome a horrible failing in the X clipboard - the inability to usefully copy/paste Ianything that isn’t text/i.
Sure, Isome/i X software supports copy/paste of images, but most of it doesn’t, and to my knowledge there’s no Ione/i standard for how you do it.
Back on point, I’ve never really liked stack-simulating clipboards, myself, but that’s my workflow.
I remember using things that did that sort of thing (their names escape me) as long ago as using System 7 on a 68k Mac, but it’s never been worthwhile - for me.
Wow! I developed the first significant clipboard extender for Windows (ClipMate) back in 1991. Since then, it’s been in continual development.
Re: KeePass - if it uses the “CF_Clipboard_Viewer_Ignore” flag, ClipMate will ignore the data, so you can avoid capturing passwords.
Re: Needs to use something that costs money - don’t worry, you can definitely PAY for ClipMate. It’s $34.95, and we fill corporate and govt’s orders all the time.
kris: Those of us (Iall of us, in the real world/i) working with a Ipointing device/i find a single-hand solution superior to a two-hand solution.
(And if I’m doing enough repetitive C+P to hurt my hand, I’ve got bigger problems than the particular keystrokes in use; if I had a two-hand key-combo I’d be going mad moving my hands around to position the cursor and switch contexts anyway.)
And insert doing copy Iand/i paste with different modifiers? Ugly. I can see the logic of insert+meta for paste, but copy? No, thanks.
DOS is dead and can stay there, even if I have to fill its mouth with garlic and put a knife over its neck.
The Nokia S60 v3 Symbian phones do copy-paste, too.
It has been present since the first Symbian nokia phone, I remember copying/pasting on my 3650 (Symbian 6).
Besser Wisser wrote:
I wonder how clipboard monitors work in general when programs
put “application rendered” data on the clipboard.
Imagine if you’re executing a copy/paste loop in a terminal window,
and ApplicationX suddenly (if only for a moment) changes the
clipboard contents.
I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re talking about (or out of)
something else.
I’m not sure where you got the idea I was talking about programs modifying the clipboard while you were using other applications. That’s not what I meant at all.
The Windows Clipboard API allows programs to put an item on the clipboard without actually putting the data into the shared clipboard memory, and thus without having to actually “render” (i.e. convert or translate into a generic format; it’s called “render” in the API) the data. If another program then tries to paste that data a message is sent to the program that put it on the clipboard asking it to render it into real data, which is then passed to the program doing the pasting.
The advantage is that if nothing does end up pasting the data, or if something pastes it but using a more light-weight format, then the CPU and memory overhead of converting and storing the data is never used.
If you consider that the vast majority of clipboard operations are copy and pastes within the same application/window then you can conclude that this is often a useful mechanism.
However, if something is monitoring the clipboard and saving its history then every time an “application rendered” item is added to the clipboard, the clipboard history manager is going to have to request the data in full so that it can be stored. There’s no mechanism to say to a program “Hey, can you render that data you put on the clipboard three days ago, before the last reboot?” so that’s how it has got to work, I assume. That loses the advantages of “application rendered” data. The only question is whether those advantages still matter so much on modern computers. I suspect they do but only in a handful of applications (e.g. massive image editing).
There is “clipboard ring” with same features in Visual Studio. and it also uses Ctr-Shift-V shortcut.
I have no time to read all the comments, I may be repeating.
I would consider it to be a nice improvement if the copy paste worked either like a stack or a queue. I guess a stack would make the most sense. It would break the whole multiple paste thing, but it wouldn’t require any new buttons. I guess it would just confuse a lot of people.
@Cristophe
“pop from the clipboard stack” - well, for a stack model “pop” means remove, too ;). The idea of copying is that what’s in the buffer doesn’t get removed. Only having “top” (return data but don’t move stack pointer) as an option renders it useless.
I wouldn’t be shocked if Microsoft purposefully ignored improving the windows clipboard with the reasoning of “People who want a multi-item clipboard should just buy Office.”
Or better yet: The windows team actually did come up with an unintrusive multi-item clipboard, but since it was so much better than the office clipboard they canceled it to avoid embarrassing the office team. 
Those that keep mentioning the Linux distros as major operating systems…
Linux ‘may’ be major, but the splintering of the distros results in exactly the lack of recognition of ‘major’ when it comes to one of the distros that is a subset of an operating system that commands a nearly insignificant amount of desktops.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the recommendation. I will give it a try.
I’ve used a nearly unknown tiny utility for years: Hamsin Clipboard (http://www.iisr-cnc.com/hamsin/). I became addict to it. It’s the first thing that I install on a fresh Windows. I can’t live without it. I agree with Jeff that it’s a must to have a better clipboard than the Windows default.
It works clicking on the program icon on the tray, or using handy shortcuts Win+1, Win+2…Win+0 to get the n-th item of the stack. It also have sticky favorites, accesed by the same shortcuts, but using the numeric pad instead of the standard numbers.
It’s a pity that Hamsin doesn’t have updates for years, it seems abandoned. The program has some bugs that never were fixed, and it could have been improved saving more than ten clips.
Thank god for ClipX. Otherwise I would be switching to linux. No question. Vista truly is a piece of … when it comes to basic things like the clipboard. But hey, flip3D looks cool and that’s all that matters right? If only visual studio ran on linux.
install it once on a flash drive, along with all your other favorite stuff, then you won’t have to “install it on every machine”
“I’ve learned that if the defaults aren’t reasonably close to correct out of the box, then the software is probably doomed anyway.”
I know someone else who thinks the same way. We should make a club!