DonationCoder.com Software > N.A.N.Y. 2012
NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo
kyrathaba:
tranglos, great support. I appreciate your quick responsiveness to feature requests and bug reports! :up:
tranglos:
* have you thought about drag-and-drop or Move to ... ? The possibility of moving a clip from one Quick view to another (and in particular to a custom view, e.g. Archives) either by drag-and-drop or an option in the context menu to Move to ... As things are the Quick views can only contain filtered clips. -joiwind (September 08, 2011, 12:38 PM)
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I'm not sure if I understand your request here. Views are by design defined by a set of conditions. So it wouldn't make sense to drag a non-sticky clip to the "Sticky" view, for example. Just make the clip sticky, and it will appear in that view. Or, if you have a view that sows only clips shorter than 10 characters, it would be illogical to allow dragging longer clips into that view.
If you mean more like manually maintained categories to organize clips - then I'm afraid Echo is designed specifically to avoid that. There are several advanced clipboard managers with that feature, from Mouser's CH&S to ClipMate, and of course it is very useful to a lot of people. However, I feel this design has a trade-off: reduced overall efficiency of searching and pasting clips. Since I spend many (too many!) hours typing text every day, I needed an app that would let me work as fast as possible. So Echo will never have categories to which you can drag or copy clips, that's exactly the feature that would make it unusable to me.
* and what about clickable urls ?-joiwind (September 08, 2011, 12:38 PM)
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Inside the editor, possibly (I will probably be replacing the editor with a different component altogether). But I don't think this can be done in the main list of clips, sorry! Basically, a clip is a single entity, a single item. You navigate between these items (clips), not inside the text of each clip. So it is physically impossible to click just a URL inside a clip - you can only click the whole clip.
I am wondering though if Echo could detect URLs inside a clip and list them in the right-click menu. Or have a special command / key press to find URLs and show them in a popup list.
(Of course, if a clip contains only a URL, it would be easy to launch it with a single click or key press. But very often URLs will be buried inside surrounding text, or you may have more than one URL in a clip, etc. Any feature to handle URLs must account for all these possibilities.)
BTW the way, unless I missed it somewhere, could you comment on the name : is it Ethervane like weathervane ?-joiwind (September 08, 2011, 12:38 PM)
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Exactly! :) It's just a word I came up with when looking for a free domain name.
tranglos:
I strongly feel that the navigation commands should be buttons on the toolbar.-superboyac (September 07, 2011, 06:02 PM)
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I agree as a general principle. At the same time, I am not yet convinced Echo actually needs a toolbar. It's meant to be keyboard-centric, and I kind-of like the sparse UI it has right now. Then again, a toolbar can always be hidden, so I'm adding a to-do!
A very cool feature to add to the editor is the ability to highlight search terms. It's already awesome how the non-matches disappear (like evernote), but to make it perfect, the search terms would be highlighted individually.
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I'll be looking into this, but right now, the control I'm using does not support that. Also, it might impact performance rather badly. But I agree that it would be sweet.
I can see of one use: trying to copy a portion of a clip already in the program.
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Quite right. I'll probably redesign that part to have an option whether or not to capture clips from "inside" Echo.
This does involve a small usability problem though. You select a clip, press Shift+F2 to open it in the editor. When you finish editing, the clip is still selected - which is what you would typically expect. However, if new clips are added while you are editing the clip, then those new clips will get selection focus. At that point it is no longer obvious whether the original clip should be re-selected when you finish editing... which is why I decided to suspend capture during editing in the first place.
In the regular view, you can't highlight a portion of the note without opening the external editor. In fact, if you made the stuff in the regular view selectable, you wouldn't even need an external editor.
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It is selectable when editing (F2). But there is only so much I can do with "in-place" editor. I could make it permanent, but consider the price: you would not be able to navigate between clips using arrow keys any more. Imagine: you press down arrow, enter the clip, and the editor is active, so that you can navigate within it, select a part of it, etc. If the clip has more than one line, you would have to press down arrow repeatedly to go past all the lines before you would reach the next (lower) clip. Navigation would become rather annoying. And since this is a clipboard manager, not an editor or a note-taker, I feel that the usability of clip navigation has priority over editing.
But I'd really like to be able to select and copy a portion of a clip without having to double-click on it first, or open up an editor, or any extra steps.
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I don't think you can avoid at least one extra step[, otherwise you'd have the navigation nightmare. One thing I could use is the "long click" idiom, or a second click on the same item. Click an icon on the desktop, it selects the icon. Click it again after a short delay, the caption opens for editing. I can do that.
And when I copy that subclip, I'd like the option in the preferences to record or ignore copied subclips. i would set it to record everything including subclips.
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The preference, yes. But in the in-place editor the selection issue is even more problematic. A new clip automatically gets selected (and usually placed on top, if you're sorting by date). Consider what that would do if you were editing a clip: select some text, copy it, and in the blink of an eye you are now at the top of the list, with the new clip selected. And it's not just a question of "so don't select the new clip" - you cannot add a new clip to the list without first shutting down the active editor. (At least I don't think it's possible, but I'll check.) When you press F2, a memo-like editor is "invisibly" placed over the clip, so it looks like you're editing the item directly in the list. But you're not: you're working in a little invisible memo. As long as that memo exists, you cannot modify the list in any way (again, I think you can't).
Another feature I'd love to have (as in CHS and Arsclip) is a quickpaste menu for pasting stuff. So with CHS and ARSclip, with a hotkey, you can have a quickpaste menu appear right under your mouse pointer which is awesome.
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I thought the menu in Arsclip was awful! :-) I mean, the menu can show only a small number of items, it cannot be searched or filtered, plus IIRC Arsclip puts it in the tray, which is usually far from where the caret is. So why or how would you use that instead of the main list in Echo? (For example, should the menu contain only certain clips that you mark for inclusion?)
As for the positioning, Echo already tries to show up right next to the caret - or the mouse pointer, if the caret is not available. This doesn't always work; in some cases Echo doesn't seem to detect the caret position, I'll have to look into that at some point.
Also, how about an option to show the entire note in the normal view, regardless of the length. I know we can set it to a big value, but how about just a "always show entire note" setting?
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...and then you open "Moby Dick" in a PDF, do Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C... No, I think there has to be a limit. Because if you did that, it would totally kill the search feature - it would take a full minute or so to update the list instead of a split second. Just set it to a really large value if you wish, please :-) .
joiwind:
Thanks for your detailed reply tranglos - things are clearer now ... ! And I do understand the way you wish to go.
About clickable urls : how about urls in the URLs View being clickable - just another idea ?
And the name : reminds me of EthervaneRadio ... ;D
anandcoral:
@tranglos, first congratulation on "Ethervane Echo" pledge.
Second I pledged "Paste Text Like", which works with clipboard too, so we are both in same boat now :)
Without making "Ethervane Echo" any lesser than "ArsClip", I will like to say that you can open the ArsClip menu at cursor position (set hotkey in Configure) and can increase the number of item (Configure / Show Options). It does has search feature (N - Search, in menu). Permanent clip with script, edit clipboard, exclude program, paste method, form mode etc. are few others which I use occasionally.
But "ArsClip" too has it's short coming, and I will suggest you take idea from it and enhance it and make it more easier.
Regards,
Anand
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