Author Topic: Clipboard Help+Spell - Top Priority Requests for 2011 (Read 67,478 times)

mouser · « **Reply #25 on:** February 25, 2011, 08:57 PM »

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I'd like to be able to tell CHS that chunks of text above a certain size -- maybe 1k? -- should be instantly purged from the database. Maybe allow some to be "locked" so they're not deleted...?

that's a nice idea. It already locks favorites from the auto pruning feature. I could add a new maintenance feature to allow some smarter automatic deletion of big clips.. or at least add a column for clip size so you could easily sort and delete. i suspect you could already create a virtual folder of old+big clips using an sql virtual folder that would do this if you know the sql.

your other requests mostly have to do with wanting to set the ORDER of items.. this has long been a weakness in CHS (and indeed a weakness in relational databases in general). i will try to add an option that will let you choose the sorting order for the quick popup menu, so you can either choose date-based sort, or sort based on an Order column that you will be able to set.. that may not be quite as convenient as drag+drop re-ordering, but should serve you purpose.

oblivion · « **Reply #26 on:** February 25, 2011, 09:55 PM »

Sounds like a plan.

I've spent a few minutes trying to come up with a rationale that could make drag-and-drop work based on recalculation of a notional count in the database, but I think the only way to do it would be to add a count for each possible table, which would mean restructuring the database every time you wanted a new view onto it, which would probably be more trouble than it's worth. Your suggestion sounds like it'd work for me -- thanks!

-- bests, Tim

mouser · « **Reply #27 on:** February 25, 2011, 09:57 PM »

i could add drag and drop but it would just be a mess.. CHS has been a great lesson in the pros and cons of using a database for a clipboard management tool. there are lots of pros and cons on both sides.

rjbull · « **Reply #28 on:** February 26, 2011, 09:03 PM »

Quote from: oblivion on February 25, 2011, 08:43 PM

My clipboard manager of choice has always been ArsClip. However, it won't play ball with the text editors I've tried to use for the work I've been doing -- Jarte primarily, but I'd have used OpenOffice or anything else that could do quick editing and basic formatting.

What doesn't work with ArsClip? It's always worked OK for me on editors. Just had a very quick check with an older version of Jarte free; looks like plain text is pasted OK, but RTF might not be. Had mixed results doing the same thing with Softmaker Textmaker, where font effects appeared to be preserved, but size wasn't.

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CHS has worked nicely with Jarte (if you haven't, try it -- it's a wrapper for WordPad, apparently, but is a very decent free rtf editor)

I think Jarte is an extended version that uses the WordPad engine, that is, more features, and more still in the payware version.

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I set a few favourites -- longish words I knew I was going to be typing repeatedly -- and set a shortcut up to bring up favourites to make them easier to get at quickly.

If you're doing what I think you're doing, you might be better off with a dedicated text expander/completer/corrector. I currently use Typing Assistant (payware). The one most often recommended is Phrase Express, which has both free-for-personal-use and payware versions. Here on DC, timns is developing Auspex, see the Timns Apps sub-board. There are others too, mentioned in several DC threads.

Another thought: if you have repetitive pasting of boilerplate clips to do, you might want to look at another of mouser's programs, The Form Letter Machine.

IainB · « **Reply #29 on:** February 26, 2011, 11:47 PM »

Some other alternatives to consider as a text expander/completer/corrector:
AutoHotkey (AHK) or LifeHacker's Texter (written in AHK).

TapTap from DC (mouser) could also be a useful adjunct to these.

oblivion · « **Reply #30 on:** February 27, 2011, 08:42 AM »

Quote from: rjbull on February 26, 2011, 09:03 PM

What doesn't work with ArsClip? It's always worked OK for me on editors. Just had a very quick check with an older version of Jarte free; looks like plain text is pasted OK, but RTF might not be. Had mixed results doing the same thing with Softmaker Textmaker, where font effects appeared to be preserved, but size wasn't.

It complained, with everything I tried, that it couldn't work out where to paste the text. (Can't remember the exact error, but it offers to -- and does -- paste to the clipboard, it just can't find the window to paste into.

I assume this is an issue with later versions of Windows than XP, as an XP machine I've used ArsClip on for ages -- well, probably a couple of years, now -- has never given me a problem. The machine I was using for this is a Vista box, and I have a Netbook with Win7 Starter that has similar issues.

Quote from: rjbull on February 26, 2011, 09:03 PM

I think Jarte is an extended version that uses the WordPad engine, that is, more features, and more still in the payware version.

That's the one. Small, lightweight, fast and effective.

I did my usual thing with this -- as with most free software I use -- although I didn't need (and don't use) the extra features, I bought the payware version anyway. Gotta keep the authors of good software in business, even if it's only in a small way!

Quote from: rjbull on February 26, 2011, 09:03 PM

If you're doing what I think you're doing, you might be better off with a dedicated text expander/completer/corrector. I currently use Typing Assistant (payware). The one most often recommended is Phrase Express, which has both free-for-personal-use and payware versions. Here on DC, timns is developing Auspex, see the Timns Apps sub-board. There are others too, mentioned in several DC threads.

I tried Phraseexpress a couple of years back -- I either didn't get on with it or it didn't work in a way I found useful, can't recall now. Perhaps I should take another look.

But I have become a big fan of portable apps. Anything like that, I want my clipboard to be able to travel with me.

Quote from: rjbull on February 26, 2011, 09:03 PM

Another thought: if you have repetitive pasting of boilerplate clips to do, you might want to look at another of mouser's programs, The Form Letter Machine.

I looked at that. Not the sort of thing I do -- but if it was, I'd be using it! It looks excellent.

Thanks for all the suggestions, anyway -- I shall do some more investigating (in between nagging mouser to keep improving CHS!)

--bests, Tim

rjbull · « **Reply #31 on:** February 27, 2011, 04:42 PM »

Quote from: oblivion on February 27, 2011, 08:42 AM

[ArsClip] complained, with everything I tried, that it couldn't work out where to paste the text. (Can't remember the exact error, but it offers to -- and does -- paste to the clipboard, it just can't find the window to paste into.
[...]
I assume this is an issue with later versions of Windows than XP, as an XP machine I've used ArsClip on for ages -- well, probably a couple of years, now -- has never given me a problem. The machine I was using for this is a Vista box, and I have a Netbook with Win7 Starter that has similar issues.

Strange. Just for you

I updated my USB stick(s) from Jarte 3.4 portable to 4.3 portable. ArsClip worked fine with both versions, at least with plain text, I haven't tried again with RTF. I'm using the latest ArsClip Beta, 3.1.5 build 4031, which is on Joe's Web site as acv315-t9.zip. OS is Vista Home Premium.

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[Jarte]'s the one. Small, lightweight, fast and effective.

I did my usual thing with this -- as with most free software I use -- although I didn't need (and don't use) the extra features, I bought the payware version anyway. Gotta keep the authors of good software in business, even if it's only in a small way!

Good for you! I don't use word processors much, mostly editors. But on the face of it, it's hard to see why it's worth paying more for an RTF WP. PolyEdit is nice, but development is glacially slow.

Quote from: rjbull on February 26, 2011, 09:03 PM

If you're doing what I think you're doing, you might be better off with a dedicated text expander/completer/corrector.

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I tried Phraseexpress a couple of years back -- I either didn't get on with it or it didn't work in a way I found useful, can't recall now. Perhaps I should take another look.

But I have become a big fan of portable apps. Anything like that, I want my clipboard to be able to travel with me.

All those I mentioned have portable versions

oblivion · « **Reply #32 on:** February 27, 2011, 06:29 PM »

Quote from: rjbull on February 27, 2011, 04:42 PM

Strange. Just for you I updated my USB stick(s) from Jarte 3.4 portable to 4.3 portable. ArsClip worked fine with both versions, at least with plain text, I haven't tried again with RTF. I'm using the latest ArsClip Beta, 3.1.5 build 4031, which is on Joe's Web site as acv315-t9.zip. OS is Vista Home Premium.

Oh dear. Same here, thoughout. That means the Gremlins are doing it. I HATE that.

...hang on, Jarte does clipboard monitoring. I wonder if it's that that's interfering... but then, it'd probably cause CHS to have problems, and it doesn't.

Mouser? There's a CHS option called Window Watching that defaults to on and that I thought might be the reason CHS worked and ArsClip didn't. Is it doing anything hugely clever that other, similar, programs might not?

I am now Proper Mystified. (I hate that too!)

It's going to turn out to be something stupid I've done, I expect. (And I especially hate that!)

Quote from: rjbull on February 27, 2011, 04:42 PM

Good for you! I don't use word processors much, mostly editors. But on the face of it, it's hard to see why it's worth paying more for an RTF WP.

People want something that can knit, bake a good rice pudding and cycle up the curtains as well as put words on paper, it seems.

I can see the justification for DTP for some people, some of the time -- but then, I've been using DTP software for outputting documents where I wanted much more precise control of things than most WPs can provide for many, many years. (1989 might have been my first DTP package. That makes me feel suddenly very old.) But you're right -- most people who want WP think Word instantly, and there's absolutely no good reason for it except Microsoft's marketing machine, most of the time.

Quote from: rjbull on February 27, 2011, 04:42 PM

All those I mentioned have portable versions

That told me

Okay, okay, I'll try again. But I still want to make CHS work better for me, because I'm arrogant enough to believe that if it works better for me, it'll work better for everyone else too. Nonsense, of course, but I haven't been a techie for all this time without having come to the conclusion that I'm right about everything most of the time.

-- bests, Tim

rjbull · « **Reply #33 on:** March 03, 2011, 10:19 PM »

Quote from: oblivion on February 27, 2011, 06:29 PM

Oh dear. Same here, thoughout. That means the Gremlins are doing it. I HATE that.

...hang on, Jarte does clipboard monitoring. I wonder if it's that that's interfering... but then, it'd probably cause CHS to have problems, and it doesn't.

Depending on your OS, maybe you had a Clipboard Chain Break? Both ArsClip and CHS have ways of detecting that. E.g., ArsClip Web Help:

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Automatic clipboard chain break detection

UPDATE: Vista users can and should disable chain break detection, since
breaks are no longer present on the Vista operating system.

Unfortunately, any program can mess up the "clipboard chain", because it is
left up to the program to correctly handle clipboard messages. ArsClip has
a workaround for this. It checks the contents of the clipboard every 1
minute to make sure that it was automatically notified of the current items
arrival. If it wasn't, it will display an error message, and then
transparently fix any future problems this session without bugging you.

It's possible that either ArsClip or CHS had fixed things when you tried again.

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People want something that can knit, bake a good rice pudding and cycle up the curtains as well as put words on paper, it seems.

Souns like you're British

If you're old enough to remember Fidonet, the standing joke about Terminate was the forthcoming dishwasher interface...

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(1989 might have been my first DTP package. That makes me feel suddenly very old.)

So you are old enough

Remember GEM?

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I still want to make CHS work better for me, because I'm arrogant enough to believe that if it works better for me, it'll work better for everyone else too.

Welcome to the Moderately Honourable Brotherhood of Beta Testers, Suggestion Makers and Software Pesterers

Going back to

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longish words I knew I was going to be typing repeatedly -- and set a shortcut up to bring up favourites to make them easier to get at quickly.

If you don't want to use one of the text expanders, you might like to look at two freeware hotkey programs, HotKeyz and HotKeyP. Both allow you to set just one hotkey which will pop up a menu of texts, or in HotKeyz case, other things as well. The images are first, HotKeyP, and second, HotKeyz.

Humph. Going too far off topic

Apologies, mouser.

oblivion · « **Reply #34 on:** March 04, 2011, 08:11 AM »

Quote from: rjbull on March 03, 2011, 10:19 PM

Depending on your OS, maybe you had a Clipboard Chain Break? Both ArsClip and CHS have ways of detecting that. E.g., ArsClip Web Help:
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Automatic clipboard chain break detection

Maybe, is as far as I'll go. In my experience, ArsClip reports breaks as well as attempting to deal with them when they occur -- and what was happening was that it was failing to work out where to paste clips, and telling me so.

I'm getting used to CHS's way of doing things, though, and Mouser's ideas about providing ordering facilities I think will bear useful fruit.

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People want something that can knit, bake a good rice pudding and cycle up the curtains as well as put words on paper, it seems.

Souns like you're British If you're old enough to remember Fidonet, the standing joke about Terminate was the forthcoming dishwasher interface...

I AM British. Don't hold it against me.

As far as Terminate's concerned, I remember it, I even used it, but I preferred Telix for comms. Fidonet -- well, I was 2:25/108 up until about 2003, when the computer it ran on suffered a fatal hard disk failure, resulting in the last known in-the-wild copy of DESQview breathing its last. (My BBS was called "Oblivion and You" and the "Oblivion" bit follows me around as it's generally the basis of my username on various fora around the place. Like here.

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(1989 might have been my first DTP package. That makes me feel suddenly very old.)

So you are old enough Remember GEM?

That's what it ran under. I've got close a couple of times, but I've never actually had to use a Mac in anger, which was the only other option for DTP, back then. (I saw a Mac for the first time in about 1984. I called it an executive toy. For many years, I stood by that description!)

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Welcome to the Moderately Honourable Brotherhood of Beta Testers, Suggestion Makers and Software Pesterers

Thanks -- although I think it's worth concentrating on the "moderately" in its title.

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Humph. Going too far off topic Apologies, mouser.

Agreed. Perhaps we should take our reminiscences somewhere more general?

--bests, Tim

mouser · « **Reply #35 on:** March 04, 2011, 08:23 AM »

New CHS version is almost ready to upload; probably tomorrow. it has ordering functionality and some other stuff. getting back into the swing of working on it, so expect more updates more frequently.

rjbull · « **Reply #36 on:** March 04, 2011, 08:39 PM »

mouser, what's the best way to answer like I did, but avoid going off topic in the thread? It doesn't always seem appropriate to start a new threadlet, but I'd rather keep things in the open than moving everything to PM.

mouser · « **Reply #37 on:** March 04, 2011, 08:50 PM »

I don't think there is a perfect way to handle such cases because you don't know ahead of time how far the tangential point is going to continue.
If you can catch it before people post back on the original topic its easy to split the thread -- but it's harder when there are mutiple discussions going on at once.

Thread seems ok to me as it is -- unless a thread is meant to serve as a permanent reference for something, i don't think its so bad when it drifts around.

Do you think it's worth splitting some posts off unto their own threads?

rjbull · « **Reply #38 on:** March 04, 2011, 09:13 PM »

Quote from: mouser on March 04, 2011, 08:50 PM

Thread seems ok to me as it is -- unless a thread is meant to serve as a permanent reference for something, i don't think its so bad when it drifts around.

Oblivion was trying CHS because he'd had an apparent problem with ArsClip, so I pursued the ArsClip bit. Which seemed rude given that this is a thread about requests for your CHS, but I like ArsClip too, and therefore had an "etiquette problem."

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Do you think it's worth splitting some posts off unto their own threads?

For appropriate posts, perhaps. Like you I don't see a general rule, but hope that moderators will make whatever judgement call seems necessary.

mouser · « **Reply #39 on:** March 06, 2011, 05:07 PM »

I have posted a new beta in the release thread here:
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=1514

Lots of new stuff.

oblivion · « **Reply #40 on:** March 06, 2011, 06:33 PM »

Quote from: mouser on March 06, 2011, 05:07 PM

I have posted a new beta in the release thread here:
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=1514

Lots of new stuff.

Brilliant! Thanks for all the work you've put into this. I'll give it a proper workout tomorrow!

-- bests, Tim

rjbull · « **Reply #41 on:** March 10, 2011, 09:39 PM »

mouser, note taking apps are a different kettle of fish from clipboard enhancers, but there's an overlap. I don't know if you've ever used Evernote, but it sounds like CHS's clip folders work like the Evernote ribbon does, i.e., date/time order is the only form of organisation. I suggest that you could mimic basic Evernote functions by adding an extra hotkey that would send the selected text or image into a predefined "Permanent Notes" folder rather than the default one, so important "research clips" didn't get mixed up with transient clips.

To mimic Evernote closer would mean a lot more work; tags (which I don't use, but many would want), more sophisticated searching with highlighting of the search strings, and support for HTML and RTF. But the basic usage might be nice, and allow people to run only one program instead of several.

mouser · « **Reply #42 on:** March 10, 2011, 09:50 PM »

there was a period where i envisioned CHS as being useful as a notetaking application -- you'll even find some old discussion about this on the forum if you look hard enough. but i think i've let go of that idea. while there is some real overlap as you say, the user interface needs are just so different that i now think that trying to combine the tools wouldn't work well.

rjbull · « **Reply #43 on:** March 11, 2011, 12:31 PM »

And I suppose if you make even one small gesture in that direction, you'll be flooded with eager requests for "just one more little feature." Oh, well. It was just an idea.

mouser · « **Reply #44 on:** March 11, 2011, 12:43 PM »

i may still take a whack at making a separate app, an unusual and minimalistic notetaking app based on my index card productivity system..

superboyac · « **Reply #45 on:** March 11, 2011, 03:00 PM »

Quote from: mouser on March 11, 2011, 12:43 PM

i may still take a whack at making a separate app, an unusual and minimalistic notetaking app based on my index card productivity system..

Sounds great! What is your index card system?

bob99 · « **Reply #46 on:** March 11, 2011, 03:58 PM »

Quote from: mahesh2k on March 01, 2011, 05:10 PM

I found mouser's index card system very effective but the problem is that there is no software version for it. I think it is possible to code it in simple way but with OCD mind here i have hard time doing that.

Anyone here know similar software or can point to such system ? :-)

oblivion · « **Reply #47 on:** March 11, 2011, 05:03 PM »

Hm. I used to use a Psion 5mx program that I used in this sort of way. It was a sort of mindmapping program -- can't remember what it was called, now -- but the basic principle was that you made entries and entries had child entries and so on. If you clicked an entry, it moved to the middle of the screen, its children were linked to it by lines. The further way from the centre of the screen an entry was, the smaller it was. I used it much as mouser uses his index cards: a task/issue had a number of components, and each of those components could have children itself, if necessary, but there was no concept of ordering beyond the basic hierarchy (I find grids and tree structures impose too much order, sometimes) and you could just delete things as you did them, and the structure would close up around the gap, much like throwing an index card away.

PsiMind. I think that was it. But it doesn't run on the emulator, sadly.

IainB · « **Reply #48 on:** April 25, 2011, 05:28 AM »

URLs - this is just a note as a "By the way" comment and question: I noticed that when I copy/paste (Ctrl-c/Ctrl-v) stuff off a web page into MS OneNote, the url where I copied it from always gets pasted also - which is very useful as a source reference. So that means that CHS could capture the same URL data doesn't it? But does it? I know it captures the application where the Copy was made.

mouser · « **Reply #49 on:** April 25, 2011, 03:47 PM »

IainB,

There is already a new option in CHS to grab the URLS from all web page clips.
Note: You may have to enable the "Notes" column in your grid view to see it (click the button on the far left of the column header row in grid).