Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Advanced clipboards for OS X

I tried two of these today and both are still installed.
The intention is that, rather than just the single available clipboard slot, the advanced versions allow very many more items to be copied to, and pasted from, the clipboard.
Shadow seems by far the best of these two.
I've set Shadow up to open with the hot-key Alt-Space. Anything that I copy to the clipboard goes into Shadows list and it holds 20 items. Edit (18-09-2008): Actually, right now there are 32 items in one clipboard and two in another. So, the limit seems very much higher.
To paste one of the items in its list, you just have to highlight the one you want and return. Then paste it as usual (+V, paste from right-click menu).
Also, what you have in the clipboard survives a reboot which it doesn't in its usual incarnation.
Also, interesting is that you can, apparently, copy paste from one Mac on your network to another. However, as we only have one Mac I haven't been able to look at this.

The other is iClipLite which is a Dashboard Widget. It's just a little bit more complicated to use but it's all explained here. A problem with this is that the "bins" into which you copy stuff are really only suitable for images. One phrase or line of code looks just the same as another so, if you have 25 things in your iClipLite and are looking for a specific one, this could be a difficulty.
Additionally, while Shadow just works without having really to do anything extra, in iClipLite you need to consciously decide that you want to store something.

Definitely, Shadow is far superior.

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