
Hain-plugin-clipboard: Replay clipboard history in Windows with fuzzy search - teknologist
https://github.com/notatestuser/hain-plugin-clipboard
======
preludeoflight
I've been using ClipX
([http://bluemars.org/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.

~~~
shadeless
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](https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ)

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

------
geocrasher
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/](http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2016/02/clipboard-manager/)

~~~
stan_programmer
Ditto!

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

~~~
teknologist
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!

------
stephengillie
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](https://github.com/Gilgamech/Main)

------
ygra
> 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?

~~~
kevingadd
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.

~~~
teknologist
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.

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

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

------
swah
Didn't even know about hain - thanks!

------
z3r0c00l
ClipMate is great too

~~~
CPAhem
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/](http://clipmate.com/)

