tranglos, great support.  I appreciate your quick responsiveness to feature requests and bug reports! 

I strongly feel that the navigation commands should be buttons on the toolbar.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

...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 :-) .

@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

Yeah, I only remember testing a version of ArsClip a long time ago. [...] if there is a special menu command to initiate search, it's probably not the kind of "instant search" that I am after.

You have to hit a key on the popup to invoke Search.  After that, it is what I think people mean by an "instant search" feature.  That is, press "d","o","n" and you get everything that includes those, add an "a", and you start to see only those entries with "donation coder" in them.  The more letters you add, the more you close in on your target, and removing letters widens it in real time, the list of possibles widens to match.

As for anandcoral's program, I think of it as in the (smaller) class of "clipboard manipulators" that includes Text Monkey, Clippy, and FDC.  I'm happy enough for them to remain a separate class of software, especially for the more specialised functions.

First of all I must say that this has quickly become my favorite clipboard manager.
Since I was using Ditto before and read your intro I downloaded the program, and replaced Ditto with it the same day.

Thank you! And welcome to DC!

There seems to be some kind of problem with the search though.
Using this clip for example.
The clip was copied in its entirety, but searching for hello gave no results...

I can tell this is going to be a FAQ

The word 'hello' in your clip is preceded by about 600 other characters. By default, Echo only searches the first 512 characters of any clip. This is important for performance reasons, since clips are not kept in memory, but in the database on disk. My justification for that decision is that a great majority of clips are not very large chunks of text, so that, um, 512 bytes should be enough for everybody

There is another reason: it is going to be very inconvenient (and slow) to browse really long pieces of text in the list of clips. So clips must be truncated for display.

Given these two practical limits, Echo uses the same setting to control two things: the max length of a clip that is displayed, and the max length of a clip that is searched.

You can find and increase the setting under Tools -> Preferences -> Database -> MaxDispTextSize.

Initially it is set to 512. You can increase it, but the larger the value, the slower your searches will be, if you do keep a lot of long clips. It's a trade-off, and you can experiment to find a good compromise.

Note also that changing this value only affects clips captured after the change. Clips already stored in the database will still be limited to the previous max value. This can be fixed (so that the change affects already stored clips as well), at a cost of re-writing the database, which may be a long operation (a few seconds to a minute or more, depending on your db size and hard disk speed).

(I should stress that the limit does not mean that clips are cut off at that length. Echo always stores and pastes back the complete clip, exactly as it was originally captured. The limit only determines how big a part of the clip is searched and displayed.

There is another setting that tells Echo to ignore (not even capture) clips that are larger than a certain length. This one is at Tools -> Preferences -> Capturing clips -> MaxTextSize, and it is initially set to 1 MB. The size refers to the length of plain text contained in the clip.)

Check out the "Limitations" and "Troubleshooting" topics in the help file as well. This issue is explained there, but perhaps not as clearly as it could be. ("Cannot find a clip, but you know it exists in the database", item 2 under Troubleshooting.)

Trying this again - havent used it much yet.

I want to edit clips within the app but keep the original version - sort of like save as
is this possible? (I couldnt find a way)

It's easy for me to do this in a text editor, so, just wondering if possible here

thanks tranglos

I ran into a problem with FileHamster (FHm) comment window - I have FHm set to show comment window when making a revision (when I save a file). This comment window is always on top.
If I then call Echo, it is below the comment window, so is not very usable - do you think could it be made more assertively (!) "on top" ?

[1] Is there a pattern to where the window shows on the screen - it always seems to come up directly behind the Filehamster comment window (just right of centre-bottom of screen), but if I escape and call it again, it shows mid left of screen.

[2] How do I change the shortcut - I tried Shift & F12 - typing in F12 but that didnt work (or does it need a restart? - no that no help)
Ctrl+Alt+v doesnt work either.
Win+v works - I'll stick with that**
(BTW what does the MK mean on the qualifier keys in options?)

** Shift+Insert worked as well

Quote from: tomos on September 22, 2011, 10:13 AM

[2] How do I change the shortcut - I tried Shift & F12 - typing in F12 but that didnt work (or does it need a restart? - no that no help)
Ctrl+Alt+v doesnt work either.
Win+v works - I'll stick with that**
(BTW what does the MK mean on the qualifier keys in options?)

Restart is not needed. The modifier is indeed optional, although it's usually not a good idea to use e.g. F12 by itself. The reason it's confusing is the same as why the whole Preferences dialog is confusing The hotkey is controlled by two settings:

In "ActivationHotkeyKey" type the name of the key itself, without modifiers, e.g. 'Ins', 'a' or 'F12'.

In "ActivationHotkeyModifier" click the + symbol at left to expand the list, and there'll be four separate modifier keys listed. Set to True for the modifiers you want, keep the rest False.

As soon as you click OK or Apply, the new hotkey should be active.

hmm.. yeah, I was doing it correctly - these particular combos still not working here.

         Shift+F12
         Ctrl+Alt+V**

Win+F12 does work so it's not a problem with F12.
Shift+F12 doesnt work with either Shift key.

I could try your app to show all shortcuts taken to see if something else is using them (what's it called again?!)

** Ctrl+Alt+V didnt work one minute ago - is now working. Something funny going on - obviously not necessarily with your app... I dont believe it's user error, but it could just be one of those days

It does look as if some other process could be swallowing some combinations.

yes, that's it, thanks

By the way, tranglos, all of your responses to my feature requests were perfectly reasonable.  I never responded back.  Yes, as usual you have thought all of this through very well.

It's a great program, I've been using it in parallel with my other clipboard programs like ARS and CHS.  With the CHS features, ARS is being phased out for me.  I like Echo for some of the interface issues.  The one I'm probably going to commit to in the end is AceText, but also in parallel with these free ones.

One thing I'm unclear about -- no matter how much I increase MaxDispTextSize, the display of each item is limited to 5 lines, even if FixedItemHeight is false. To view more of the item I need to adjust the width of the window. Even then I never seem to see the full item, unless I use the editor. Is there another setting I need to adjust?

MaxDispTextSize applies only to clips that will be captured after you've changed the setting.

Another setting controls how many lines of each item can be displayed: Preferences -> Display -> MaxLinesPerItem. This one will be applied immediately, but the displayed text of each item will still  be limited to MaxDispTextSize.

Thanks, MaxLinesPerItem was what I was looking for. But I can't set it higher than 10?

I'll remove this restriction in the next release. The practical limit is the vertical screen resolution, because items taller than the screen would be quite inconvenient to view.