The current clipboard metaphor sucks

Apothe0sis

I'm sure that everyone has, at some point in time, been in the position in which you have to repeatedly retype a whole mess of different phrases making it impractical to copy and paste as you can't do that separately.

Of course Ap0, you say, but that is why the Unix invented vim, regular expressions and find-and-replace. But, I say unto YOU - sometime you don't have the ability to use tools like this - for example, if you have to build a scanning policy within an application that doesn't allow imports or exports because it is an annoying bitch.

I'm envisioning an app or mod or patch or whatever which allows you to define an arbitrary number of copy buffers and a specific key combination to retrieve them.

e.g. you might to crtl+alt + c,v,b,n,m to copy the text and then ctrl+shift c,v,b,n,m to retrieve those buffers respectively.

In addition you should also be able to define functions for dynamically updating the buffers - e.g. when the property you've told the buffer to monitor changes, the next time you retrieve the buffer it would be the updated value, causing a buffer to act like a stack the values pushed and popped, or simply an array or series of values defined like so "[1:3].[01:10]" which would give the values 1.01, 1.02, 1.03 ... 3.10.

Is this a thing is there anything even remotely like this? Has a super-copy-paste application been invented for Windows and or Linux? I'm currently trapped in the former but am happily looking forward to when I can return to working exclusively from the latter. Do I have to make it myself?

ben0207

I used to use sometihng like this in OS X. Can't remember the name, but it wasn't that useful so I got rid of it.

Echo

ben0207 wrote: »

I used to use sometihng like this in OS X. Can't remember the name, but it wasn't that useful so I got rid of it.

Yeah, there are several apps that add separate clipboard stacks, keeping the last X cuts/copies saved, letting you switch to that app to select which one to paste.

TheSonicRetard

I wrote a dev-tool for dreamcast development which works exactly like you described with the stack push/pop buffer. You'd set a watch value and when you pasted in the source, they acted like pointers back to the original value, updating the source code as the values changed. It was incredibly handy.

like say for example I created a var object Temp, when I'd reference it later in my source, I could hit a key combination and it'd paste it. So like, if temp had properties x and y, I could hit ctrl+alt+V and be able to type "temp.x" or "temp.y" and then later, if I changed my source to rename var object temp to, say, test, then "temp.x" or "temp.y" would dynamically change to "test.x" and "test.y"

I imagine adding something like that to gedit or some text editor wouldn't be difficult.

Zeon

Theres an "extended" clipboard which does pretty much what you want. Its included with Microsoft Office but i think microsoft offers it as a stand alone download. If not, there is definately a free download out there.

The other thing you can do is buy a keyboard with macro keys and save each phrase on a macro key. This is what i do at work when i have to type multiple long phrases or strings of code more than once. The logitech G series keyboards are what we use, but i dont know if the macro key software works in unix (probably not, but someone might have written something by now).

Phyphor

The issue would be getting it to actually work with everything, not the implementation itself. The actual windows clipboard stores only a single piece of data, although you could format it to store multiple things, you would then have to modify any other apps you want to know about this functionality

Phoenix-D

Phyphor wrote: »

The issue would be getting it to actually work with everything, not the implementation itself. The actual windows clipboard stores only a single piece of data, although you could format it to store multiple things, you would then have to modify any other apps you want to know about this functionality

Or just mod the settings so when you paste, the data is copied to the "real" clipboard first and pasted from there.

elliotw2

Klipper on KDE totally does this

Zeon

Phoenix-D wrote: »

Phyphor wrote: »

The issue would be getting it to actually work with everything, not the implementation itself. The actual windows clipboard stores only a single piece of data, although you could format it to store multiple things, you would then have to modify any other apps you want to know about this functionality

Or just mod the settings so when you paste, the data is copied to the "real" clipboard first and pasted from there.

Which is exactly how the Office extended clipboard works. Everything is routed through the "regular" clipboard so it works in any program that accepts input from or uses the windows clipboard.

Which becomes a pain in the ass when youve got a program that uses the clipboard to store strings (who knows why, worst decision ever), but does it so fast the extended clipboard gets confused and starts dropping strings.