I can’t believe I haven’t used a multiple clipboard app before. I have to do a lot of of copying and pasting when I write. Very often I quote a number of disjointed snippets from other texts—multiple clipboards come into my arms!
The price seems okay but since I’m always short on money and I want to find the right one for me—the Scrivener of multiple clipboard apps, so to speak—I did some googling and via this interesting Macworld artic (and previous ones it links to) macworld.com/article/143465/ … ities.html
I found a bunch of other apps:
I will test them all by myself but I would love to hear from users of these apps (and others not on this list too, of course) what they recommend and why.
As far as I know, there is no Scrivener of multiple clipboards. You might, as you say, use LaunchBar (or Butler or Quicksilver) for other reasons.
But PTHPasteboard, which I settled on after AmberV’s endorsement on this forum, is a good all-rounder, which will also re-style clips for you if you want and whose resource demands don’t seem to be excessive. My only real concern with it is whether it’s still being developed.
And resource demands is indeed very important point. Another one: Possible conflicts with text expanders. Mine is Typinator and all clipboard apps I have tested seem to work fine with it.
As to PTHPasteboard: Version 4.5.3 (313), 11/18/2009 seems to indicate it is still being developed. So far this is my favorite too. Does not look as good as Clipboard Evolved (my #2) but is very flexible.
Based on alexandria’s recommendation, I happily used iClip for awhile, then it started giving some problems after Leopard so I switched to JumpCut, also free and fine, but then I read about ClipMenu which offers 20 recent clipboards AND snippets (like iClip had) that you can use for your address, website URL and other items frequently pasted into messages or notes. It’s free and has been working great since I installed last month.
A neat trick I like to employ with these kinds of applications is to use them as a snapshot and file sharing feature. With PTH pro you can share your clipboard over IP, which means snippets and whole files can be rapidly transferred between machines. The feature offers encryption and authentication, so it is reasonably safe to use even over the 'net. If I have a few things I’d like to quickly send to my work machine before I leave home, I don’t even bother with finding the USB drive. Just copy and when I get to work they’ll be in the paste buffer.
As for snapshots, it’s a nice way to quickly save states in applications that do not offer a nice uniform roll-back feature like Scrivener. I find this invaluable in tandem with TextMate. I can make “milestones” in a file I’m working on simply by copying the entire buffer out. What I do is type in “Milestone_001” or whatever in a comment, copy buffer, and then later I can use the handy pastboard search feature to look for “Milestone_” to weed out just these markers. It’s now a habit of mine to Cmd-A/Cmd-C whenever I open anything.
I’m not sure how well these tricks work with the others, but with PTH you can switch it from “session saver” to “pseudo-archivalist” by telling it to remember items after restart, and then setting the history store limit to something ridiculous like 1,000,000.
PHTPasteboard is it. Although I’d love a HUD like clip window as in Clipboard Evolved but must not be the main reason for buying an app. (And by the way: Clipboard Evolved allows only to customize the window in height and not width. And in drawer mode—which I prefer—it is too small to read a clipping.)
Handling of PHTPasteboard is really nice and so are the filters. They even work as Snow Leopard bug workarounds: Since 10.6 the coding of Umlauts in PDF is wrong. As far as I know there are two identical looking sets of umlauts and all of a sudden Print to PDF uses the other one. Result: The font I use does not contain this set and a plain text paste from a PDF spills Verdana umlauts all over the pasted text. Annoying, but PHTPasteboard fixes this. At least it works with one, I hope it will not be slowed down will all six of them (and some more finde & replace actions).
That leaves one question: Is it possible to use PHTPasteboard in Scrivener’s full screen mode?
Yes, just make sure you have a hot key assigned to Show Main. The Dock will pop up when you do this, but you can just tap the number of the pasteboard buffer you want to paste and it will appear in Scrivener. I also set up hot keys to paste from the first few buffers. For example, Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-2 will paste from Main:2. This way if you keep things in your head you needn’t even mess with the main palette.
After trying several clipboard apps, I’ve settled happily on Launchbar for the past year or so. LB had already become hardwired as my app launcher/address lookup/file browser/bookmark finder, plus a few more esoteric roles. Extending that functionality to using it as my extended clipboard has become second nature. Rock solid, light on resources, intuitively designed … LB shares the stage with Scrivener and Devonthink as being one of the third party apps I Cannot Do Without.