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Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

I stopped worrying about it when I installed the Ditto clipboard Manager[0]. It keeps everything, so don't have to keep track of what I copied in my short term memory. I offloaded that task to the computer. Turns out they're good at that kind of thing.

I wrote about it back in 2016 on my very ugly website: https://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2016/02/clipboard-manager/

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

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It’s such an unassuming piece of software but it might be the most important executable on my laptop. It’s basically an instant notebook. Find anything remotely interesting? Just CTRL-C it and it’s there whenever I need it.

Ditto is really good. I've been using it for a long time too.

Not only does it store a bunch of things but it's really easy to search through existing clips, especially text.

It's also:

    - Extremely efficient from a runtime perspective, it uses ~2mb of memory
    - Loads nearly instantly when you invoke it
    - Very easy to paste something without formatting (surprisingly useful)
    - Open source

It's in the same category of greatness as IrfanView and foobar2000 for Windows apps that I'll likely use until the end of time.

I was using ditto then later found clipdiary[0]

It was super easy to customise and once I'd setup shortcuts for everything, never needed to open the app window in 2+yrs

[0](http://clipdiary.com/)

Windows also comes with a native clipboard manager. Win+v to use it.

Last I checked, it wasn't as good as Ditto. Plus, Ditto is burned into my workflow now, just as much as AutoHotKey is :)

What makes Ditto better?

The Windows clipboard manager doesn't support search. Ditto does. As soon as you open it you can just type a subset of some thing you recall copying the other day and it will immediately filter to that entry (or those entries). Biggest reason.

Ditto also rearranges the items so the last pasted is at the top rather than the last copied. This is also helpful because if I'm pasting something regularly, it's nice for it to be at or near the top.

You can configure how much history you want Ditto to store, by days or number of entries.

The Ditto clipboard entries are not as visually bulky as the Windows clipboard history entries.

The Ditto window can be resized, the Windows clipboard manager cannot be.

Those are the main reasons for me. Ditto also has a bunch of more advanced features but I've never used them.

I use ditto too and set it so it has everyting I copied in the last 2 weeks. It's really nice to be able to instantly retrieve some text which I copied 4 days ago, for example.

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