Clipboard Managers Done Right
Friday, March 20 2009, 01:46 - Permalink
I just had a look at the screenshots of Parcellite, a GTK+ clipboard manager, mainly because I didn't know what it is.
And just like with Getting Things Done tools before, I immediately had a few ideas how clipboard managers like this could be improved.
If you add a file or a URI to the clipboard, what do you expect to see in a visualization of the clipboard? Do you expect to see the path or filename or do you expect to see an icon and the filename together with a button to open or launch that file? Maybe even a possiblity to drag the item into a file manager or some other program? It's very easy to do things like that with GIO or even ThunarVFS.
What if you copy an email address into the clipboard? Do you expect only to see the email address or would you rather like to see the email address with one or two buttons (add to addressbook, send email)?
What are your experiences with clipboard tools? Are you using them at all? If not, why? What features would you like to see in a clipboard manager to make it attractive to use?
Comments
I'm using clipman from/for xfce. It is the only clipboard manager which works flawless for me. Glipper crashed on my system quite often during the start of GNOME. Parcellite is nice but i always have to press ctrl+c to copy the selection into the clipboard. That makes Parcellite useless for me.
For me the main feature of a Clipboard tool is the history. Allowing me to access one of the earlier selections. And it should work like typical copy&past under GNU/Linux. That means if i select something with the mouse it should be copied into the clipboard manager and be set as the "active" entry. That's all i need.
Klipper from KDE and clipman from xfce doing just that reliable and i'm quite happy with both.
I use Yankee Clipper on Windows. The linux clipboard managers are good, but the only feature I miss is keyboard shortcut. Without them, they're useless for me (I don't want to stop typing, and search for mouse, point it to the applet, and search for the entry with mouse).
@Akos: Dude, thanks for the reminder, I totally forget that feature. Clipman 1.0 is going to be released soon :P I will have a look at BZ before I release.
http://www.machsoftwaredesign.com/c...
I think that's the idea of the whole stuff :) I was googling for an icon and I stumbled on something else...