You need a lot of thought and more imagination than me to think of a Microsoft Windows "feature" more lame than the clipboard.
Press the hot key and Clipboard History gives you instant access to the last 20 text snippets you copied and saved, for instant pasting into any application you want to use.
A brilliant innovation in Unix, Mac and Windows systems 25 years ago, the clipboard is like the pathetic old man in the white suit - the disco needs his business, but how out of date can you get?
The clipboard was totally rad when it came out. It has put the phrases "copy and paste" and "cut and paste" into the dictionaries. It is absolutely sensible on a computer, where once you type or enter anything, there never should be a reason to create the content again.
But the clipboard defies science, natural selection and Darwin. In a world of evolution, where the only thing constant is change, where everything must adapt or die, the Windows clipboard sits there in defiance, as stuck in time as a senior official at the Ministry of Culture.
Copy a paragraph, paste it. Copy a second paragraph, paste it. And the first paragraph ... is gone. The man (of course) who invented the clipboard never considered whether you would want the first paragraph again. Which is fine for a Version 1.0 of the clipboard, but ridiculous some two dozen years on.
It is a measure of the Microsoft (and Apple) lameness that dozens or more likely hundreds of nice, generous programmers have invented hundreds of different methods to do the clipboard, all of which without an exception are better than the way of Mr Gates and Mr Jobs.
The first, according to legend, was student geek Chris Thornton, in 1989. Today, he heads a small company that markets a spiffy clipboard extender called Clipmate. Here are a couple more.
ClipX was first made available in 2004. It is so stable and so appreciated by thousands of users that author Francis Gastellu and collaborators have made almost no changes in appearance or manner of working. Under the hood, the little app has been made more robust.
ClipX is a multi-lingual (speaks Thai) hoarding program, which sucks in everything you copy to the clipboard - text and pictures both - and then makes it all available at any later point. From a list of items you copied to the clipboard, you select one and ClipX pastes it anywhere, to any application.
For text, ClipX does not retain formatting. That is, if you copy a ransom note you make in Microsoft Word, ClipX only copies the text in vanilla-Ascii format. If you paste it back into Word, you will have to re-format it. But if you paste it anywhere else, like email, you will not have to remove all the horrible Word formatting.
ClipX also copies and keeps images. Personally, this is an extremely minor feature, but I work with words. People who work with photos and graphics, this is a huge advantage. If going back and re-copying text is tedious, going back to find and re-copy images is annoying and boring.
In the configuration menu, you can tell ClipX how many items to add and keep, and you can turn off copying of images if you really don't need that.
The other excellent feature on ClipX is a hot key to turn it off entirely. You don't need a copy of everything you copy. So turn ClipX off with the hot key when you don't need it, and a reminder big red "X" goes over the application's icon in the system tray. When you want it to record again, turn it on.
Clipboard History is also somewhat confusingly called Clipboard Manager by its Coburg, Germany, distributors.
Please don't make a lot of this, but this program is my current favourite of its type, and I have it installed on each computer I use.
Here's why. My work is almost all words. When I work with images, it's pretty basic stuff, and never repetitive. The words, on the other hand, are often repetitive. I do research, drafts, writing and rewriting. I write and answer memos and emails, and there is a lot of repetition.
Clipboard History configures for me. I can keep a list of the last 20 items I copied, and then very, very quickly paste two or six or 11 of them into my notes or story draft. It also configures to keep a list of boilerplate items, equally accessible, such as my email address, my office address and a frequently used paragraph about inflation and the cost of ladies' nights for my letters pleading for a raise.
Now why I really like Clipboard History - because there are any number of programs that do almost the same as the above, in various ways. Clipboard History is operated by one solitary only unique hot key. By default you press CapsLock and up pops your list of copied items; press or click the one you want. It is ever so much easier (for me) than a combination hot key such as Alt-P or Ctrl-Alt-P.
Both Clipboard History and ClipX work with all Windows versions, 32- and 64-bit.
ClipX is kept inside the otherwise esoteric website bluemars.org/clipx while you can find Clipboard History at http://www.outertech.com.
