Quick Paste Question and Suggestions

[AEngineer]

Question
What is the function of the quickpaste group in the navigation pane?  It seems as though it duplicates what's in the "new" clipboard without any difference.  In particular, deleting clips in QP deletes them in the main clipboard, which doesn't seem logical.  I'd think that it would be a location to identify and order clips that may be pasted in order.

Suggestion 1 - Following from above
Revise quickpaste so that one can add and delete clips here without deleting from the main clipboard.

Suggestion 2 - Allow identifying clips in main clipboard to be put in QP group en masse

Suggestion 3 - Make it possible to paste starting from top or bottom of clips in QP group

Suggestion 4 - Make it possible to cycle through repeatedly.

Suggestion 5 - Provide a toggle to automatically replicate new clips from main clipboard or not to QP group

[mouser]

Before I answer your questions more specifically, let me address the root of the weirdness.

The "Quick Paste" menu/group is actually a "virtual" group, defined by some sql filtering on the clip database.
If you right click that group, and say edit, you will see something like this:


You can see how the SQL defines what appears in that group (and thus in the quick paste menu).

So by altering that SQL (and the custom menu sorting SQL below) you can actually tweak what is displayed in that menu and the order.  Some people alter it to change the default behavior of only showing clips from the last day, etc.


You can also always reorder clips by changing their value in the the "Ordering" column, which will take precedence over the normal date ordering (which will be used secondarily).

It's because this is a virtual group that clips can appear in this group as well as the NEW group, and why deleting from one will delete from the other -- there is only one copy of the clip, and it lives in one real group -- but can also be shown in multiple virtual groups.

Although the concept is a bit odd, it does allow CHS to do some nice things, like have a virtual group that shows all clips that are urls, or all clips that contain a certain keyword, or all clips that came from a certain application, etc.


The Favorites group is another virtual group -- it shows all clips which have their "Favorite?" checkbox checked.  Note though that you can also manually move a clip to be located in a virtual folder as its home folder -- which will show it there even if it doesn't match the sql.  In other words, if you manually drop a clip in the Favorites group, it will show there (and only there), even if it doesn't have its "Favorite?" checkbox checked.

[AEngineer]

Thanks.  Understanding the logic helps.

I got part of the way towards being able to make the QP group serve in the way I want.  I displayed the "ordering" column and then added SQL so that only items that had a number in "ordering" would display.  Great.
I then sorted the ordering (tried it in both QP and "new" windows and set the marker on the first.

Result:
The first item pasted fine.
The next in the QP group did not paste.  Rather the next clip ID pasted - no surprise, but not what I'd hoped.

Would it be possible to paste using the sequence displayed in the display grid rather than the clip ID?

It would also be nice to have a toggle to clear ordering so one easily could start afresh.

Along with that if one could Shift-click or some such so that the next order in sequence was applied that would be great.

I Understand that I'm pushing for my idea, which may not be what others would want.

[mouser]

Can you clarify a little bit what you mean when you are talking about pasting a sequence.. I'm not sure I follow what you are doing.. do you mean you are using the "stack" feature?

Have you tried the "merge" feature? It might be easier for you to select all the clips at once and merge them before pasting?

[AEngineer]

Yes, I'm attempting to use the "stack" feature to be able to paste a series of clips that I may not have clipped in the desired sequence.  I typically use this for form-filling in databases or web pages (which of course are database entry tools)..

[mouser]

ok i gotcha now.
yeah let me look into how hard it would be to get the stack feature to be more flexible about what it considered the stack.. it's a bit tricky..