Paste 'n Go...

[kfitting]

Hey mouser, just started looking at Clipboard Help+Spell (CHS for short... sorry, I work for the government, a place where all problems can be fixed if an acronym is assigned) and was wondering if you could include a paste shortcut.  Overall I think CHS has some awesome functionality.  THe only major thing missing is a way to easily recall the saved clips.  THe idea is based off MIke Lin's Clipomatic.  You press a hot-key (Ctrl-Alt-V, for example) and a menu pops up right above the cursor showing you a quick summary of all the currently stored clips.  You can select a clip with the mouse or with the keyboard and then, by clicking or hitting enter, it is AUTOMATICALLY pasted at the cursor.  The reason I emphasize automatically is because some programs merely copy the clip onto the clipboard, requiring yet another keypress.  Honestly, this is the one feature that makes me come back to Clipomatic despite its lack of formatting features.  A clipboard utility becomes infinitely more powerful when, using only the keyboard, you can rapidly switch back and forth between 2 or more recently copied clips.  Just a thought, other than that, great utility!!

Kevin

[mouser]

id be happy to add it -
there are plenty of other clipboard tools out there, some free, so i figure the real way we can have fun with this one is to add some good features.

actually chs already has a little button that will try to auto paste the currently selected clip into the window that was open before showing CHS, but it could be easier to launch the program and select it.

to test though, go to your application and put the cursor where you want, then hit ctrl+alt+V, select the clip, and push the button that looks like a clipboard with green arrow leaving it.

i know its not ideal for what you want though, so lets figure out the best way to do it.

simplest way i guess would be to emulate clipomatic - you hit a hotkey and it pops up menu of recent clips, showing a little of each one; you press the number or letter and it pastes it in, plus maybe an option at the bottom for opening full dialog for more detailed examining of clips to paste.  or can we improve it?

one of the things i was never happy about was the search in clipmate, so i added a really cute easy search system in CHS.  just type some words and it auto filters clips that have those words in them.

i am definitely going to try to add the auto mouse copy on select as an option, and also the as-u-type dynamic object speller; both will be optional of course, as is the core history functionality of CHS.  so that if you like, you can disable everything and just have it copy to its buffer when you explicitly request via the hotkey.

[mouser]

i'm quite interested to hear if anyone can come up with any unique suggestions for CHS..

i got a little carried away with the text formatting options; i'd really like to keep the program easy to use.  but i'd love to hear some unique suggestions for useful features.

[kfitting]

Sounds good... yeah, I think emulating Clipomatic is a good idea (though I am mostly biased here!).  One other thing I noticed is that when I copy/paste non-text things CHS inserts a blank into the window.  Ok, I havent tested this thoroughly, just with AutoCAD, but it would be handy to either not capture something CHS doesnt recognize, or display a warning about it.  Thirdly, would there be a way to capture and recognize different formating?  For example, I copied a table from Keynote (RTF) and it showed up as straight text.  Could CHS be made to recognize RTF, HTML, etc and copy and paste it as text or its native format?  (I remember someone saying they would like it to convert HTML to text since not all programs recognize HTML formatted clips.)  Just my three thoughts so far,

Kevin

[mouser]

I'm using a database and it actually wouldn't be too hard to add capture of all clipboard formats (images, html, rtf, etc.) if this is something people wanted - i really use these tools only for text, but i can see a case for being more flexible.

[kfitting]

I think that's something that should be a format option... you would see the copied data as it's formatted in whatever program you copied from (HTML, RTF, etc) but you could choose to strip it to plain text.  Even cooler, though more involved, would be a convertor so you could go from RTF to HTML and vice versa.  But, this isnt necessary.  Having the option to keep it as it's copied would be very handy, however.

Kevin

[Dormouse]

it actually wouldn't be too hard to add capture of all clipboard formats (images, html, rtf, etc.) if this is something people wanted - i really use these tools only for text, but i can see a case for being more flexible.

-mouser (July 21, 2005, 07:04 AM)

Did this ever get added? If it did, I haven't found it yet. And it is a pretty essential feature for me.

With it, I could design a RTF form and then paste it from CHS whenever I wanted to use it - and in whichever program I wanted. One of many examples of uses I'd have for it.

I've only recently started playing with CHS, and it never occurred to me that this feature may not be present.

[mouser]

chs only works with plaintext at this moment -- if you select and copy some richtext stuff, formatting will be lost when you paste.