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Messages - DonationCoderTransmit [ switch to compact view ]

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1
Thanks for the sanity check, app103 :).

In frustration, I went back to both Easy Mouse Lock and DDMM to see if I could bash them into workable order. Easy Mouse Lock remains hopelessly slow (as described above) on my system. But I found how to get DDMM working: turn it off and on again!. More specifically, using the "Save and close" button alone doesn't save anything, for me. But unchecking and rechecking "activate mouse management" after inputting user settings, and then clicking "Save and close" does the trick.

And once set up (essentially creating a 3 pixel virtual desktop across the bottom of the screen), it works perfectly (so far). The cursor stops just above the (invisible) border, and activates every Taskbar tab, Quick Launch button and Tray icon. No cursor sluggishness at all, nor any other drawbacks, so far.

I don't use autohide but, at least for me, setting a 1 pixel boundary allows both Taskbar tab/button activation and autohide. (Though it needs 3 pixels to activate the Tray icons too, and that scuppers the autohide trigger).

Anyway, I seem to have solved my problem. Thanks for replying, and to snouffelaire, a member here for DDMM.

2
The problem is probably somewhere in your Taskbar settings, like AutoHide or similar, or a rogue driver or tool disturbing your Taskbar behavior in some way :o

I don't use AutoHide. I only use "Lock the Taskbar" and "Keep the Taskbar on top of other windows", but changing those makes no difference.

I don't think I have any other tools messing with the Taskbar or screen real estate.

My graphics card and/or driver might well be to blame, but I'm stuck with them :(.

Can you not move your cursor underneath a Trayicon, such that it doesn't trigger the tooltip? I thought that much, at least, was standard (bad) design. Without a Theme, Windows (other people's, not just mine)  even shows a visible border around (and therefore underneath) the Tray. Maybe it is just me.

Thanks for the suggestions, anyway.

3
Give CursorUS a try.
http://www.loonies.narod.ru/cursorus.htm
Thanks, it does what it claims to do. But does nothing for this problem, I'm afraid.

4
The 'problem': my mouse cursor sometimes dives below my (XP SP3) Taskbar buttons, and always dives below my Trayicons. I think this is an irritating UI design failure: if I want to click a Taskbar button, or Trayicon, I should be able to fling my mouse to the bottom of the screen, not aim 1 pixel up from the bottom.

I fear this is partly a Theme issue, because if I change Themes (to and from any or no Theme) and re-boot, the 1px 'dead' area below the Taskbar doesn't exist. But if I re-boot again without switching Themes, it's back, lying in wait ...

And there is always a dead area (2 or 3 px, I'd guess) below the Taskbar icons, no matter what. I don't know if this varies with hardware, but I've seen the same on some other PCs. So far I've been automating the Theme switch shuffle on shutdown and startup, but that's a slow kludge.

What I think I need is a tool which restricts the movement of the cursor to a slightly smaller area than my desktop, e.g. to 1280x1022 instead of 1280x1024. That way, hitting the bottom of the mouseable area would always trigger any Taskbar button or Trayicon underneath.

Oddly, I'd already found what would be the perfect tool for this problem, if only it worked better ...

Lock Mouse Cursor with Mouse Lock Utility

 Use given below software utility to lock your mouse cusror within defined rectangle / area. Define upto two rectangles to limit the mouse cursor movements. Lock / Unlock Mouse Cursor with a simple key press within defined rectangle or close the Mouse Lock application to unlock mouse cursor and allow the mouse cursor to freely roam on your computer screen. You can even enter whole desktop width and height to limit the mouse cursor movement, which in turn can be helpful in a dual monitor computer setup avoiding mouse cursor movements to the other monitor / display. Free to try download of Mouse Lock utility allows to Lock Mouse Cursor upto 20 times.  Download Trial Version of Easy Mouse Lock utility now and try it for free.

It does exactly what I was after. Alas, with it running, the cursor moves around any edge of the desktop as if it has been coated in treacle, which is a cure worse than the ailment.

Searching here on mouse/cursor restrictions led me to various dual monitor tools, including DDMM, but it has no effect at all on my system (perhaps because it isn't a dual monitor system).

And there are some AHK or AutoIt threads here, but programmatically moving the cursor up a few pixels when it hits a defined area, seems too slow to be comfortable (at least as I tried it using PowerPro).

So, does anyone know of a similar tool which works better?

Or another way to solve or workaround this problem?

Am I the only one bugged by this? ;)

5
You are right there is not currently a way to paste a specific date using just a hotkey.  I may add an ability to set hotkeys on specific clips -- and if i do that i will make it possible to design clips with dynamic text like date+time.

Great, thanks.

Until then though i would suggest using something like AutoHotkey which is popular here on the forum and which you could use to set up custom hotkeys to do all kinds of things easily.

Yeah, I use PowerPro for that sort of stuff. But having it send keystrokes to navigate through the (cascading) menu is less than ideal: it's visually clunky, and it's a bit unreliable if the PC is doing lots of other things at the same time. For example, I log some stuff (DSL connection info, copy'n'pasted from my router's web ui) at bootup, and while all the startup disk-thrashing is going on, it's not unusual for the keystrokes to get out of sync with the windows (i.e. the menus) meant to receive them. Or sometimes some manual keystrokes, i.e. me, accidentally interject. But the new 'instant' hotkeys are much more (completely, so far) resistant to interference. I just need the date and time to be equally available.

(Of course PowerPro has clipboard and date/time functions of it's own, and if I could convince it to paste the date and time on one single line, then I wouldn't need CHS to do it for my bootup log, but either it can't or I can't).

Your other suggestion though is also not a bad one -- which is to add some kind of generic DATE/TIME data to the formatting presets options dialog, so one could add date/time to beginning or end of a formatted text block.. I wonder if that's something that would be more generally useful to people..

Either would be fine for me, but I'd vote for both. I suspect the formatting presets options dialog is far less used, indeed far less discovered, than the date/time or formatting presets themselves. So I think the ability to hotkey any specific clip would be more generally useful to more people, but improving the presets options dialog would be more generally useful only to power(ish) users.

If you're tinkering with the presets options dialog, then extra options to strip lines containing triggers would be cool. For example, 'Strip line if character(s) present|not present'.



i wish i had a nice guide to give you for the shark and jellyfish infested swampy waters..

There definitely is no way to set precedence of groups so that a clip will only appear in one and not others when their conditions match..  an important thing to realize is that virtual groups are not physical collections of clips -- they are just filters that decide on the fly which clips to show inside them that live physically in other groups.  So a clip is always shown in its "real" group, and then in any other virtual groups.  

I thought I had a handle on that, but now I'm not sure the local wildlife haven't eaten my brain. It looks like the Clipboard group and it's New and Old subgroups will accept SQL filters, as they have the checkbox and text entry box, and their contents change to blue if SQL is used. But they don't seem to do anything. I copied the (working) SQL from the Quick Paste group, and applied it to, for example, the Old group. But nothing in that group changed (except the text colour!) Is it a UI quirk? Or do only certain SQL expressions work in those groups? If so, what, for example?

Then there's the whole Recycle Bin can of beans. I can edit the Recycle Bin to auto-capture clips including "Junk Text", and it will. But any group using IsInRecyleBin will only trigger on items actually deleted to the Recyle Bin and not clips, such as "Junk Text", which only appear in the Recyle Bin because of its own SQL expression. Nor will it trigger on sub-groups of the Recyle Bin. And emptying the Recyle Bin will only delete clips actually deleted to there, not SQL'd there. So, if I've got this right, whilst editing the Recyle Bin with SQL works (unlike with the Clipboard groups) it's hard to find any useful purpose in doing so! I was looking for a way to auto-delete certain types of clips, so that they only appeared in the Bin, and nowhere else, and could be permanently emptied from there. But I don't think that's possible, right?

(I'm halfway there with a Junk group: I can hide stuff SQL'd there from the Quick Paste group, and I can periodically delete the junk by using the Junk group's 'Delete All Clips in this Group' command. So I'm just suggesting possible feature tweaks, not complaining about actual hardship :))

And it's not possible to add to the special fields to test for special folders (IsInRecyleBin, IsInClipboard, IsInClipboardNew, IsInClipboardOld, IsInFavorites) so that, say, IsInMyJunkGroup would work, right? That would make things so much easier, I think. We could craft whatever simple or complicated SQL for each new group as appropriate. Then simply add NOT (IsInMyGroupA), NOT (IsInMyGroupB), etc, to whichever other groups we wanted to omit that stuff from. I don't know if that's even feasible.

In any event, I wonder if you might create a new default one, say IsInRecyleBinGroup, which acted on whatever is in the Recycle Bin, or under it in a sub-group, no matter how it got there? I appreciate that may not be possible either (even assuming you liked either notion).

So one option is always to move it out of the Clipboard group and it will still show in the virtual group

What's the trick to do that? I can, and have, done it so some clips are moved out of the Quick Paste group and into a new "Junk" group. By editing to this in my Quick Paste group :-

Code: Text [Select]
  1. NOT (IsInRecyleBin) AND (ModificationDateTime>=DateTimeMinusFiveDays) AND NOT (ClipText LIKE '%Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]:%')

And this in my Junk group :-

Code: Text [Select]
  1. NOT (IsInRecyleBin) AND (ClipText LIKE '%Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]:%')

But I can't seem to get the same clips out of my Clipboard groups. I tried both in that group, and indeed just the default Quick Paste format of :-

Code: Text [Select]
  1. NOT (IsInRecyleBin) AND (ModificationDateTime>=DateTimeMinusFiveDays)

But the Clipboard group(s) refuse to change at all. What, amongst the many things I'm sure I'm doing wrong, is the crucial error?

(to add confusion you can actually move clips so that their "real" group is the virtual group).

But only by drag'n'drop, you mean? No way to automate that process?

With sql you can use things like parentheses , and, or , not, etc.  so you can exclude conditions quite easily.  Maybe the easiest thing now since there is no good guide is post what you are trying to do and your sql expression that is not working and we can try to help.

"Quite easily" for you! ;). But I'm slowly getting some of the basics (notwithstanding what you're about to tell me I'm getting wrong in the above examples). I found this, which seems to have helped me, and perhaps you'll say if it's a bum steer for other newbies: http://beginner-sql-tutorial.com/sql.htm and especially : http://beginner-sql-...ogical-operators.htm

And maybe this: http://beginner-sql-...oracle-functions.htm  but only because it's the only site-search result there for "lower" which appears to be pretty vital in our context (i.e. for (Lower(ClipText) or (Upper(ClipText) or just (ClipText) )

And, again, just to group these links together: Mouser's "Creating a virtual clip group in CHS to show you all clips with URLs in them"

Oh yes, what else apart from ClipText, and the listed special folder and date/time fields, is available from within CHS to build into an expression?

Personally, since I don't really have the time, inclination or smarts to learn SQL properly, I find the (few) examples around to be the most helpful, as a starting point to bodge and hack into versions suitable for my purposes. Mouser, the imminent new release will surely bring quite a few users back to the forum for a while. How about you then starting a (sticky?) SQL Expressions thread, posting a few examples and inviting users to post theirs and/or suggestions of how and why they use them?

Wow, this was a long post. Thanks for the help so far, and please don't feel obliged to take time away from your other work to address all this.

6
No need to apologise, Mouser, I appreciate that you're spinning a lot of plates. And thanks for the good news: I'll certainly let you know if it does the trick.

I suppose this is the right time to mention my other tiny issue. When I call up the Main Window (from the Quick Paste Menu, or hotkey), I like it to be maximised. But the first time (only) in each session, it opens as a normal (not maximised) window. After then maximising it, it re-opens maximised on subsequent occasions. But that setting is not sticky across CHS sessions. Could it be, please?

7
That's great news, thanks. I'm looking forward to it :).

8
This is a very old problem, reported before, which I am sorry to still see in v2.

In short, I think CHS is picking up the Status bar black background from my XP SP3 system Theme, but not also picking up the complementary white text from the Theme (instead, I guess, CHS's text is 'hard-coded' as black). The result is that the text is invisible.

I'm sure it's a rare occurrence, with a peculiar Theme, and I'm only reporting it while I'm posting other stuff too. But I presume programs are supposed to pick up all Theme elements, if grabbing any of them? And I don't think I have a black status bar in any other program: is CHS coded so that the status bar is picking up the colour from a menu item? I have lots of (system themed) things with black menus (almost all of which with white text). If so, is that, er, right?

It would be nice to quash this little buglet, if possible ...

9
Hi Mouser,

The 'capture the URL source of a clip' feature doesn't work for me, when copying from Opera 12 (on XP SP3). The clip is captured, but no Note of the URL appears, and the right click menu for clip items of "Visit URL of clip" remains greyed out.

It works fine from IE8 and Firefox 4, and everything else seems to work to and from CHS < -> Opera, so it's not an (obvious) misconfiguration.

It's a killer feature, so I'd love to have it working with the browser I use 99.9% of the time ...

10
I've just upgraded from 1.2x to 2.00.03, and love the great new features, thanks :).

I have a few queries which may be tricks I've missed, or feature suggestions, depending on what I don't know.

1. The new hotkeys to instantly paste Format Presets, without invoking the menus, are terrific.

But how do I do the same for a Date/Time Preset? The Format Presets dialog doesn't seem to have a way to input a Date/Time as appended text. The main Hotkeys dialog doesn't have a suitable entry. The Date/Time Paste Presets section of Options doesn't mention them. It seems I can almost do it, but not quite?


2. I found your thread on using the SQL stuff to create a virtual Group to catch URLs. And I found (and have now lost) a post which helped me make a group which grabbed certain clips from a specific program. Which tempts me to try to make/tweak a few more, for example, to modify the Quick Paste group so that it excludes certain (noisy/repetitive) clips from certain programs. But the Help seems almost silent on how to construct the expressions, and the note within the Group Edit Dialog only gives a very few examples.

Is there an idiots guide to creating SQL conditional expressions anywhere, please?

Also, is there any way to (optionally) create prevalence among the groups? So that, for example, if a Rubbish and Noise group was created and edited so that clips containing the text "This is a frequent and useless, but alas never entirely a duplicate, clip" were automatically captured there, then they wouldn't also appear in lower priority groups (such as Quick Paste)? If not, as seems likely, presumably the Clipboard and Quick Paste groups could be edited to exclude the same things as the Rubbish and Noise group includes? (If one knew how to construct the right expression ... ).

Or what would happen if, instead of using a new Rubbish and Noise group, the Recycle Bin group was so edited (as well as inputting the contra entries in the Clipboard and Quick Paste groups)?  Poof, all the crap auto-disappeared? Or some life-threatening feedback loop?


11
Got the non-debug interim, thanks.

12
Works perfectly! :)

Nice one Mouser, thanks. I hope it works for tomos and jeffthemartin and the others, and look forward to the release version.

I'm going to push my luck, while you're into the code, and pitch my top two wishlist items :-

1. A way to promote some or all of the items currently on the Quick Paste's "All Clips" sub-menu, onto its main menu.

2. A way to access the "Formatting Presets" (particularly "TrimLineBreaksPlus") without invoking the UI. Presumably a command line argument, e.g. so we can use CHS to tidy up broken URLs before passing them onto a browser (using a script or macro or hotkeys), without having the Quick Paste menu flash into view.

Anyway, that would be icing on the cake.

(The log is attached, FWIW, though it only has successes to record.)

13
Just a reminder of my other symptoms and findings :-

I have the same problem. XP Pro SP2.

It's not related to the type of target app: I get it everywhere, including Notepad.

Doesn't matter if I click the target app first.

Doesn't matter if I use the 'simulate keys' option.

It always overwrites the active clip (so a subsequent manual Ctrl+V always works).

Sometimes it works fine for a few pastes, maybe 3 or 4 in a row, but then it always reverts to failing to paste, maybe for 10 or 15 in a row. Testing into Notepad, with nothing else running, reliably repeats this experience.

I only have a few old versions downloaded: the last one I have which works (perfectly!) is Version: 1.16.0.1 (CRC-32: 7A4ED312). Just swapping the .exe between that version, and the latest, reliably toggles the bug on and off.
-DonationCoderTransmit (August 26, 2009, 07:06 PM)

14
And here's another one. This time I just copied the word "Test" then attempted to repeatedly paste it into the same Notepad window (using the mouse or keyboard hotkey from the quick paste menu). Nothing else is going on at the time. As the debugout2.txt shows, sometimes it works, but mostly it fails.

15
do you have the "Watch Windows" checkbox checked? does it make a difference?
Yes I do, and it's the same on or off.

if we are talking about triggering this from the quick paste menu -- does it matter if you use the mouse or keyboard to trigger the item to paste?
Same using mouse or keyboard.

and am i right that you are triggering the quick paste menu with the hotkey (not from system tray)?
Yes.

who can reliably make CHS fail to paste into the last active window -- are you willing to test versions of CHS if i upload for you -- to help me diagnose the problem?

Happy to help. I've attached the debugout.txt

Lots of "CHS FAILED TO PASTE  -- Last Active Window is 0."

Good luck!

16
 :'(

17
Yeah, I'd forgotten exactly which features went with which of the many clipboard apps I've tried recently. It's ClipMate, I think, which can't open its window at the cursor or caret.

Nevertheless, the Ditto window is still just a window, rather than a menu. The selection doesn't move as you move the cursor, and you have to double-click to paste, rather than just single-click. And you have to (scroll and) click into 'favorite' groups, rather than mouse-navigating through CHS's cascading menus. (Or use the keyboard, of course). I could certainly live with it, if I had to, but I prefer the CHS system.

I also use CHS's formatting presets to clean up line breaks, etc. And sometimes the spellchecker.

So I really, really hope Mouser can find the problem.

Looking again at your earlier post, I note that CHS can do everything you like about Ditto, albeit not quite as directly in a few cases :-

I have set Ctrl+Shift+V to bring up the clipboard history items menu. Any item from this menu can be pasted either by typing the corresponding number or using cursor to navigate and press enter or just by double clicking.

CHS does all that (with single-clicking, in fact).

We can also set hotkeys for any of the last 10 items that we copied. I have set Win+V to paste the 2nd item because usually that's what I want to paste often. Ex. There is username and password mentioned in an email and you copy both. Since username is what I need to paste first in the web page that prompts for these, I press Win+V and for pasting the password and Ctrl+Shift+V followed by enter for pasting the password.

If you set CHS to use Win+V for the Quick Paste menu, then Win+V,2 pastes the 2nd item, and Win+V,1 pastes the 1st item. Almost as direct.

The best thing about this program (perhaps this feature is there in other similar programs as well) is that once the menu is shown we can start typing any text and the matching clip will show as you type the text. We just select the ones that we want and paste.

CHS has the same feature in its main window. I suppose adding that to the Quick Paste menu would be cool (if it's possible to have an input field on a menu?)

We can also select multiple clips from the menu and paste all of them in a single click. The program is smart enough to realize that we want to paste the last item first.

If you hold down CTRL while clicking individual items from the CHS menu, it will paste each item as you click it, then make the menu reappear ready for the next one. Again, almost as direct (though without line breaks between items).

I'm not trying to dissuade you from Ditto, of course, just comparing, out of interest.

18
I'm glad you like Ditto, sri, and it's certainly feature-packed. (Though it also has the often-won't-paste bug for me).

What I most like about CHS is that the 'Quick Paste' list appears as a menu at the cursor, rather than as a separately-located window (and of course with it's own separate full window just a further click away). I use a PowerPro mouse shortcut (right+middle buttons) to call up the Quick Paste menu, so 90% of the time I can use CHS entirely with the mouse.

I do have a few minor feature wish-list items, but I'm not going to push my luck ;).

19
I understand the demands on your time Mouser, and there's certainly no need to apologise. I'll keep my fingers crossed :).

(Thanks for the ClipX tip, sri).

20
I guess CHP is the poor relation in the Mouser software empire  ;).

So I'm hunting for alternatives. Annoyingly, the freeware, open-source Ditto has the same issue for me.

ClipMate works fine, though I prefer CHS's system of a selection menu rather than a separate window. And ClipMate is $35, of course :(.

I prefer CHS to all others I've looked at, but naturally this often-won't-paste bug is a killer.

I hope this might be of some help to acepelon, jeffthemartin, tomos and any others experiencing this issue.

And I'm still monitoring this thread, and will be happy to test any potential fixes, Mouser, if you ever get a chance to track it down.

Best wishes.

21
Any luck yet, Mouser?

22
Great, thanks :)

23
I have the same problem. XP Pro SP2.

It's not related to the type of target app: I get it everywhere, including Notepad.

Doesn't matter if I click the target app first.

Doesn't matter if I use the 'simulate keys' option.

It always overwrites the active clip (so a subsequent manual Ctrl+V always works).

Sometimes it works fine for a few pastes, maybe 3 or 4 in a row, but then it always reverts to failing to paste, maybe for 10 or 15 in a row. Testing into Notepad, with nothing else running, reliably repeats this experience.

I only have a few old versions downloaded: the last one I have which works (perfectly!) is Version: 1.16.0.1 (CRC-32: 7A4ED312). Just swapping the .exe between that version, and the latest, reliably toggles the bug on and off.

The latest (called v1.24.01, but containing an .exe with Version: 1.19.0.1 (CRC-32: FACFBB05)), and an earlier one also with Version: 1.19.0.1 but with a CRC-32 of: 47EEF219, don't work.

If you can provide download links for versions since 1.16.0.1 (CRC-32: 7A4ED312), I can pinpoint exactly where it went astray, if that helps?

24
Sweet, thanks.

--- limitations ---
Windows does not provide information about what program registered a particular global hotkey. Therefore this information is not available through ActiveHotkeys either.

You might add a button to start a scan for such programs? If that's too far off-piste, then this is a handy companion tool :-

http://www.zealsoftstudio.com/shortcuts/

Shortcuts Map
Version 2.3 Release Date: April 8, 2004
Platform: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003
Shortcuts Map will help you to manage hotkeys assigned to Windows shortcuts on the desktop or in the Start menu hierarchy. With the straightforward user interface, you can easily to change a hotkey or find an unused hotkey.

http://www.zealsofts...hortcuts/shtsnap.gif

shtsnap[1].gif

25
Thanks for the interesting explanation, Mouser.

I just noticed that PECompact has a freeware version too, and I've crunched mine down to 2.1MB now (about .5MB better than UPX). I'll go back to the original if it starts crashing ;)

Just a suggestion, but this topic (your new policy, the reasons, the possibility for users to compact their own if they wish) might make an interesting paragraph in the next newsletter.

I understand that my peculiar status line issue will have to wait at least until quieter times :)

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