Ctrl C

August 3, 2007 9:43 AM

Top 10 Clipboard Tricks: One of the greatest features the point and click interface brought to personal computers is the clipboard - that invisible, temporary shelf you use more times per day than Google. If you think the clipboard is only about Ctrl+C, you're missing out. Several utilities can turbocharge your clipboard and track, transfer and reformat the clipboard to your heart's content...
posted by domdom (18 comments total)

Uh, cool article, but generally round these parts we don't just repost Lifehacker.
posted by Happy Dave at 9:51 AM on August 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

I just had the horrifying image of trying to provide tech support to someone with all these utilities installed alongside each other. I think I'm going to go sit in the corner and tremble for a bit.
posted by Riki tiki at 9:52 AM on August 3, 2007

There's been some ask.mefi threads where people have asked how to enter passwords on a public terminal, especially if thy suspect a keylogger is present.

One answer has been to have that password in the middle of some scrambled text in a webpage. Then they just copy/paste their password in. It seems using a machine with a copy/paste buffer history would undermine that strategy.

Maybe a clipboard should just be a clipboard?
posted by vacapinta at 9:59 AM on August 3, 2007

domdm: I'll believe these ten strategies have value if you tell me you used one of them to make this post!

:-)
posted by salishsea at 10:09 AM on August 3, 2007

Yeah, not so much with das lifehackerfilter, BUT: That copying Windows alerts with Ctl-C is pure gold, and I cannot believe I have never heard of it.
posted by everichon at 10:16 AM on August 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

That windows error one is nifty. Synergy is without doubt, The Shit.
posted by Skorgu at 10:30 AM on August 3, 2007

Temporary buffers (I'm sorry, "clipboards") are not just a GUI/WIMP thing by any means.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 10:38 AM on August 3, 2007

the clipboard deformatter is the best thing in the world ever.
posted by boo_radley at 11:04 AM on August 3, 2007

Synergy is without doubt, The Shit.

No kidding. I seriously don't know what I would do without Synergy... flipping between my server and desktop with just the push of the mouse is an incredible convenience. (And yeah, the clipboard-copy between computers comes in handy too...)
posted by wfrgms at 11:20 AM on August 3, 2007

Thanks for the post. Not being a lifehacker patron myself I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
posted by vito90 at 11:26 AM on August 3, 2007

One of those top ten should have been how to get MS Office to stop randomly opening the clipboard toolbar all in my face.
posted by exogenous at 12:25 PM on August 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

I didn't even have to look at the link to figure out that these tips will not at all help me as a Linux user. Still, it would have been nice if you'd mentioned "Windows" somewhere in the FPP, for those less intuitive than I.
posted by davejay at 1:10 PM on August 3, 2007

I was going to post the same comment regarding Mac, but then actually did look at the link and noticed that many of the mentioned utilities are available for Windows and Mac.
posted by vacapinta at 1:22 PM on August 3, 2007

davejay writes "I didn't even have to look at the link to figure out that these tips will not at all help me as a Linux user. Still, it would have been nice if you'd mentioned 'Windows' somewhere in the FPP, for those less intuitive than I."

"Windows" is not synonymous with "not-Linux".
posted by Bugbread at 1:31 PM on August 3, 2007

No kidding. I seriously don't know what I would do without Synergy... flipping between my server and desktop with just the push of the mouse is an incredible convenience.

Holy shit, I've been looking for something like this for some time.
posted by IronLizard at 4:46 PM on August 3, 2007

the clipboard deformatter is the best thing in the world ever.

I agree wholeheartedly. Whoever brought about the advent of default rich text copy/paste desperately needs a spanky wanky.
posted by psmith at 6:03 PM on August 3, 2007

In Word I avoid the rich formatting problem by assigning a macro to paste without formatting, bound to the keyboard so it's easy to use.
posted by exogenous at 7:02 AM on August 4, 2007

My favourite (Windows) clipboard utilities are gclip.exe and pclip.exe from the unxutils package. Both are command line programs: pclip emits the clipboard contents to stdout and gclip takes stdin and puts it in the clipboard, thus allowing you to integrate the clipboard into your shell pipelines. E.g., to transform your clipboard contents to uppercase in one easy line: pclip | tr a-z A-Z | gclip. It's a shame that these two tools don't seem to be distributed separately (I use cygwin, so the rest of the package doesn't interest me).
posted by bunyip at 9:15 AM on August 4, 2007