#53. Getting Clipped and Loving It

We don’t allow our customers to get clipped* at the Tool Bar & Grill. But we do like to help them manage their clips. Clips, of course, are items that you copy or cut, for pasting elsewhere.

[*For my non-American readers, “getting clipped” is slang for being cheated.]

Windows provides a “clipboard” that remembers the last clip you copied or cut, enabling you to paste it. But the primitive Windows clipboard holds only one item. Copy something else, and your first clip is gone forever. Sorry, Bill, that’s not good enough. To work efficiently, we need to copy many items from various places, and then paste some here, some there… and keep some permanently for repeated future pasting (i.e., “boilerplate”).

True, Microsoft Office has an enhanced clipboard that holds up to 24 items. Sorry, Bill, still not good enough – we need still more clips, and not just when using Office.

Fortunately for you, the Internet offers many clipboard management utilities that hold large numbers of clips, and enable us to do far more with them, absolutely free. Even more fortunately, you have me to recommend the best among them. And on top of that, you also have Mark Lautman to tell you about Linux clipboard managers.

Having tried many clipboard managers over many years, I now rank ClipMagic and ArsClip as my favorites.

Gold Medal: ArsClip

ArsClip is a the clipboard tool I use on a day-to-day basis. This free, open-source utility stores both rich text (but only if saved as a permanent item, that is, boilerplate) and graphics with previews. You can edit text clips, and you can arrange how they appear in the list (see the example below), with multiple categories of boilerplate clips. You can search for clips, and ArsClip also remembers recently deleted clips on a submenu.

To paste a stored clip, just pop up the list with a hot key and select the clip with the mouse or keyboard.

ArsClip won first place with its efficient balance between deep functionality and ease of use. It works will all versions of Windows.

Silver Medal: ClipMagic

ClipMagic is former shareware that is now free. Its rich array of features results in some complexity, but the learning curve is by no means an Everest. ClipMagic supports rich text and graphics with preview. You can edit and merge text clips and check their spelling.

You can set up a tree of categories for your clips, and specify the age or number of clips to keep for each category (forever for boilerplate). You can define rules for automatically categorizing clips, ignoring certain types, and more. You can search for clips and filter the list.

What’s more, ClipMagic stores metadata about each clip; for example, you can attach searchable notes to a clip. And if you copy a clip from a Web site, ClipMagic records the address with the clip (see the screen shot below). The clip database can be backed up automatically on a schedule.

The main reason ClipMagic took second place is that its primary function, pasting clips, is more complicated than it should be. Even if you change the default configuration to enable easier pasting, you still must open the clip list, select an item, close the list, and then paste the item. ClipMagic also includes a screen capture tool (window or region), but this did not work for me.

ClipMagic is the choice when you need to classify and manipulate clips in many ways. It claims to work with Windows versions up to XP (I have not tried it with Vista yet).

Bronze Medal: It's a Tie

Honorable mention goes to:

Yankee Clipper III is distinguished by its simplicity and drag-and-drop operation. Its erratic forgetfulness on my system behavior cost it a higher rank.

Clipboard Help+Spell offers sophisticated features like spell-checking, basic formatting (trim lines, strip characters, change case), automatic database backup, and more. But its inability to preserve rich text formatting and graphics, and its steep learning curve, hold it back.

Clipboard Management in Linux

By Mark Lautman

There we were in the Linux Room, finalizing our column for this week's issue of the Tool Bar and Grill. All of the sudden the editor-in-chief came in.

“Stop whatever you’re doing. We're doing a special edition for clipboard utilities.”

“But, boss, I just figured out how to break into the Chinese banking system. I think our readers will be more interested in free money than in clipboard...”

“Never mind that! Our readers are a spiritual crowd, and they want utility, not instant wealth!”

When we talk about managing the clipboard in Linux, the first question we need to ask is “Which clipboard?” There are three that I know of:

• The desktop clipboard (accessed by Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V)

• The Xterm clipboard (accessed by selecting text in a command window)

• The VIM clipboard (accessed by a " and a register letter)

The VIM clipboard is native to that program, so there is little magic available for it.

However, for the first two clipboards, there is a nifty utility called Glipper (for Gnome) and Klipper (included with KDE). It picks up all your copies or selects, and you can display them by pressing a shortcut key (Ctrl+Alt+C by default). This utility works only for text, not graphics or other objects. Here’s what it looks like:

If you are running KDE, you can also use the included xclipboard. This utility collects your copies from the desktop. You can edit text entries. Click Next or Previous, and then paste the visible entry into the target application. It seems to copy all objects, but I couldn't get it to paste graphics into OpenOffice.

One small Java utility can be used with all operating systems: clip2png. This saves a graphic in the clipboard as a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file on your desktop. —Mark Lautman

Thanks for getting clipped at the Tool Bar & Grill today. Please return every week for more great utility recommendations. And feel free to explore our advertisers’ offerings by clicking on the ads in and alongside this column.

Did I overlook your favorite utility? Tell us about it by clicking on “comments” below or writing to jonathanstoolbar@gmail.com.