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Comment by jaggs | Hacker News Reader

A bit more basic, but I use two free desktop PC automation tools which I now can't do without.

1. TyperTask (https://typertask.en.uptodown.com/windows) to automate common tasks like adding different email signatures for different addresses etc etc.

2. ClipX (http://bluemars.org/clipx/) for managing a huge clipboard history file. This saves me SO much time it's unbelievable.

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It surprises me how many people don't use a clipboard manager. I use PasteBot on the Mac.

I've had Ditto [0] on my PC for almost a year now, and I could probably count on two hands the number of times it's come in handy for me. Can you explain what is so great about having a clipboard manager? I feel like I'm missing something, and if it would become truly useful to me by using it a different way I'd like to learn.

[0] https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/

It depends on your workflow. I sometimes find myself alt-tabbing multiple times to copy stuff over. Othertimes I accidentally overwrite my clipboard and lose some text that I was writing. Being able to recover it from the history is nice.

I use Pasteapp on macOS and FastKeys on Windows, which comes with other useful stuff, such as a shortcut for controlling volume by using the mouse scroll wheel on the right edge of the screen, macros, and a text-expander. The ones I use the most are:

ddate = 2020-02-18 ttime = 03:40:26 nnow = 2020-02-18 03:40:28 @@ = my email

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