Hain-plugin-clipboard: Replay clipboard history in Windows with fuzzy search | Hacker News Reader

Hain-plugin-clipboard: Replay clipboard history in Windows with fuzzy search

github.com

22 pointsteknologist17 comments

I've been using ClipX (http://bluemars.org/clipx/) for years now. It's search and UI isn't that sexy, but it does a wonderful job of keeping track of the text and images placed on the clipboard. I especially enjoy it's ability to show images inline in the context menu.

Yeah, I was also very happy with ClipX while I was using Windows. Since switching the main OS to Linux a couple of years ago I've tried many other clipboard managers and found that CopyQ is the best (for me): https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ

It's being actively developed and also supports OSX and Windows, so it's worth giving a try.

The inline images feature looks neat. Thanks for the suggestion!

Looks interesting. I've been using Ditto for some time to do clipboard management. I wrote about it here: http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2016/02/clipboard-manager/

Ditto!

Polling seems like a bad choice when APIs like AddClipboardFormatListener exist.

I'm aware of this. Right now I wanted cross-platform compatibility but will work on better non-polling solutions for individual platforms soon, where Windows will take priority. Hain is going to work on other OSs so this is something I must consider!

Cool - didn't know this was a need.

Watch-Clipboard has been part of my PowerGIL Powershell module[0] for about a month, it checks your clipboard 10 times a second and writes it to the Powershell window when your clipboard changes.

[0] https://github.com/Gilgamech/Main

> Future work

> • Support unicode

It's 2016. Virtually every operating system and programming language in use supports Unicode. How is it still so hard to support it (especially in this case where the data being copied should not matter at all to the actual routines doing the save/restore). Am I missing something fundamental here?

The problem is that they wrote this in JS/node so it's using some sort of horrible bodged hack that interacts with the clipboard using ancient ASCIItext-only compatibility clipboard APIs.

It's also polling the clipboard on a timer instead of using clipboard change notifications, which has some relatively obvious implications for power efficiency on laptops, along with the ability for it to miss history entries. This is also a very dangerous behavior for applications that add virtual clipboard data - clipboard data is not guaranteed to be resident, so by trying to capture it as text you may be performing an RPC to the application that put the data on the clipboard and asking it to produce text for you. If the text lives across the network on another machine (this can happen :-D) you may be waiting a while.

Regarding power efficiency: I've profiled this method. Its impact on battery power is negligible.

I guess the best way to ease this concern will be to make the interval variable. Polling is often the only way to access clipboard data (it's that way on OS X, by the way.)

Regarding RPC / complex data: This does not happen. Only simple text in immediate memory is captured.

Removed from the readme - that's old and no longer applicable. Thanks for flagging it.

I used arsclip for this. Your UI is nicer though. -- [http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/97/]

Nice work! I'll be trying this out. The instructions should add that Hain must be restarted after installing the plugin.

Didn't even know about hain - thanks!

ClipMate is great too

I agree, I've looked at a lot of them and the $35 I paid for ClipMate is a good productivity investment. The only thing about ClipMate is that its search feature doesn't work well anymore. http://clipmate.com/

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