Cut and Paste and Paste Again

Do you do a lot of cutting and pasting? Of course, you do! Who doesn’t? You will, of course, know the frustration of using the standard Windows clipboard if you’re working with lots of text and graphics and cutting and pasting the same items repeatedly. Windows clipboard stores just one item. Cut or copy something else and the previous clip is lost forever and you’ll have to do the cut/copy on that one again to get it into the clipboard.

In steps ClipX. This is a tiny clipboard history manager. It works like a dream (assign a hotkey) and can store as many as 1024 clips and retrieve them for pasting at any time. Sweeter still it’s free (unlike the possibly more powerful clipcache manager program I have been using for years.

ClipX is more than a multi-clipboard program (of which there are many). It has plugins to extend its functionality way beyond the default clipboard.

• ClipX Stickies - Keeps a list of permanent entries at the bottom of your history. It’s a boilerplate section, in other words, which means you can save frequently used chunks of text or images that you will use repeatedly in your work and play.
• ClipX Auto Update Plugin - Automatically checks for and downloads the latest version of ClipX. Obvious really, although the latest version is dated 2005, so I doubt you’ll need this one. That version works just fine.
• ClipX Limits Plugin - This excludes some clipboard clips based on size in memory so you don’t overburden the program with enormous one-off clips you’re not going to use again.
• ClipX “Save Image As” Plugin - Things start to get interesting with this plugin. Cut/Copy a graphic and it gives you the option of saving the clip as a PNG or JPG file. Very useful if you slice up lots of images.
• ClipX DiskLog Plugin - Records your clipboard lifetime history to disk (text entries only). You have to be quite anal to want to save everything you cut and paste to a standalone file, but there might be circumstances in which this would be useful.
• ClipX SmartNavigation Plugin - This plugin analyzes whatever you cut or copied and reconstructs a valid URL or program command line so you don’t have to worry about extraneous spaces and tags when you copy a web address from an email for instance.
• ClipX ColorPicker Plugin - For years I’ve used a program called Colorificator to grab the hex value of a color under my mouse. But with this plugin, it’s possible to grab the pixel color and copy the hex code straight to the clipboard ready for pasting into Photoshop or other graphics program.

Anyway, it’s a very useful free program. Although I recommend it Clipcache Pro has a little more functionality that you pay for, such as a cleanup function and an inline wordcount which are very useful to any writer.