ClipX Showcast

Introduction

I am starting a new category to showcase some of the tools I started using, and why, and how can they helped me and might help you out as well.

In this post, I will be talking about and showing the ClipX tool.

So this small tool is a life saver for me, and I have been using it with everything from day to day tasks, to coding for well over 2 years now. It is a clipboard history manager but for a tool that was last updated in 2008, I’m impressed at how well it works, and I have yet to encounter any issue with it.

So let me give you a couple of examples of where I found it the most useful:

• While coding in Visual Studio, I developed the habit of deleting lines of code as a whole, so to do that, I instinctively use the Shift + Delete shortcut to remove a whole line of code, the issues with that is, that the shortcut is not a “Delete whole line” shortcut, but a “Cut” shortcut, so if I want to remove a line of code and place something else there that I previously copied, then by using the shortcut, I just erased my clipboard and I would have to either copy what I wanted again, do a bunch of undoes, or other steps to get what I had previously stored in my clipboard.
  • Enter ClipX to the rescue, because the tool keeps a history of the clipboard I could easily use the ClipX shortcut, or click on the icon in my task bar and select the line I wanted to use, even better, it caches the last copy or cut, so if I use the cut command on several blank lines, then it will only show up once in the history.
• We’ve all been in a spot where we need to copy some information from one place to another, that usually involves having two windows on the screen, or going back and forth between them.
  • My approach with nifty tool is, I would go to the source of the information, make several copy actions on the information I will need (for example an IP address, or an URL) and then in my destination window (Notepad, Word, Visual Studio, etc.) just pick from the history what information I needed and place it in the appropriate spot.

So what other features does this tool have in store for us? Well let’s see:

• It can remember between 4 and 1024 clipboard entries.
• It can save entries from one login session to another.
• It can run at startup.
• It can hold images and file copy commands in its history, so you can copy some text, an image and some files, and then just paste them where appropriate.
• You can save and load a whole history, so for example. you can save a few links you received and copied to a file without opening them in the browser and then load them up another time, or on another PC.
• You can search and edit entries that were stored in the clipboard, so you can change a copy you made before you paste it (though sometimes, it’s faster to just paste and copy the changed version again).
• It has a plugin SDK in case you want to add your own features to the tool.
  • Some neat plugins can already be found in the tool’s website, like the color picked (another one that I used on occasion) to copy the color found under the mouse pointer in case you ever want to use that color, or a plugin to limit how much is stored, or to store directly to disk.

So all in all, with the amount we copy and paste in our day to day lives, yes, I personally call this little tool, a life saver.

I do want to give you a warning, if you use this tool and copy passwords, use it wisely, clear the history, delete the password from history when done, the reason is that based on the number of saves you have it set to, it can persist, and also it’s in CLEAR TEXT so please be careful around passwords.

Thank you and see you next time.

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