HN Explorer

Show HN: Clipboard Plus, free and open-source clipboard manager for Windows

59 points by oormicreations ↗ HN
Clipboard Plus is a Windows utility to view and manage the Windows clipboard.

Download : https://github.com/oormicreations/ClipboardPlus/releases

It maintains and can display up to five copied items or clips.

Clicking on a clip loads it back into the clipboard and it is ready for pasting into another application. You can clear or save individual clips or all clips by clicking on the corresponding menu items.

You can edit the clips and open urls directly from the clipboard plus.

The clips can be added to sticky clips, which is like a built in sticky notes with reminders etc.

You can enable or disable password mode. When enabled, it masks the copied passwords. You can minimize the Clipboard Plus window to the tray.

This tiny but useful utility is completely free and open sourced.

40 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 82.8 ms ] thread
dzek69
Windows is going to get multi item, synchronized between devices clipboard in next month.

I don't know the details, but it sounds pretty nice.

Your tool seem superior only when it comes to masking passwords (how does it know it's an password that's copied btw?).

Wishing you all the best though, alternative apps can make a good push for Microsoft to implement useful stuff into Windows, plus they're nice for users.

JBiserkov
Yes, Win+V to paste from history!
maxxxxx
The way MS implements things like this there usually is always space for someone to do better. The author definitely should check on what MS is doing but there be plenty of opportunities to do better than MS.
ASipos
This is similar to how there was a big market in providing basic services (like file explorers or drive compression) to Microsoft's crippled operating system from the 1980s (DOS 3.x-5.x) and then Microsoft slowly adding them in the 1990s to their platforms (DOS 6.x + Win 3.x; Win 9x) and putting those companies out of business.
llao
> synchronized between devices clipboard

Holy hell, that sounds like the utmost crazy privacy problem. Is it end-to-end encrypted?

norealidea
its synced to your personal Microsoft account, only if your email is tied to your OS. How is that a "utmost crazy privacy problem", plenty of people do the same thing with cross platform tools.
ubercow13
There's also ditto

https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io

dmortin
Ditto is great. I tried several clipboard managers and I found Ditto the best.

A great feature which is not enabled by default is serching for substrings in any order, so if you want to search for an item which contains somewhere the strings 'dog' and 'cat' for example, then you just type 'dog cat' and it finds all entries which contain both of these substrings in any order anywhere.

criddell
My only complaint with Ditto (and they may have fixed it by now) is the clip database grows unbounded. I ran out of space on my drive and I found the Ditto database was taking up several gigabytes. There is an option to delete and it took a long time to finish (overnight).
pasbesoin
I haven't used it in a while, but I recall a count limit that would trigger trimming when exceeded. In fact, as I recall, I had to manually increase or remove the default of... was it 500?, in order to get clips to stick around for the period of time I required.

Clips could also be flagged (I forget the terminology used) so that they would not be automatically deleted. For stuff you used chronically or really needed to keep around (in which case, you shouldn't be solely trusting it to the utility's database -- even though, backed by SQLite, that was pretty darned stable; not entirely, though, back then, as I had it bork on me once or twice).

BrandoElFollito
This was with the limitations in place (how much entries to keep, for how long)?

I never actually checked how big the db was, I assumed that it is pruned with the limit in place

sdegutis
I noticed VS Code has this same feature when doing auto-completion and it made me realize how useful it is and that all auto-completion and fuzzy-matchers should have it.
jsilence
Is there something like this for Linux?
pasbesoin
Back when I was on Windows in the corporate world, Ditto was one of my most effective tools. (Constant context switching: Well, with Ditto, if you copied it, it's still in there and usually just mimimal few keystrokes of a search away.)

With all the .NET Linux migration stuff, I was hoping Ditto might finally make it to the Linux if not 🞵NIX world. Not yet. (I don't know in detail how it is composited and whether my hope was/is realistic.)

In Linuxland, there is CopyQ. I haven't tweaked i3 Window Manager, yet, so that its window performs as a float/pop-up instead of a tile, so I can't directly compare with Ditto. But it doesn't seem to be as complete and fluid in use.

Note, too and in that regard, that Ditto data storage is an SQLite database. The utility is quite performant, even with hundreds of active clips. (I'd significantly bump up or outright remove the clip count trim boundary. Even if something happened a week or three ago, I'd usually find it -- or relevant pieces of it -- within a second or three, within Ditto's clip storage.)

If Scott (I think it was) happens to read this, any thoughts about a port to 🞵NIX?

h1d
When someone keeps using sourceforge as their main site/repo, I wonder how relevant the project wants to stay.
BrandoElFollito
I use ditto for years and it never failed me. It is fantastic.

One great feature is the ability to pasy an unformatted version of the clip

pbhjpbhj
I'd be surprised if that's not a trademark infringement; there are a lot of "clipboard plus" projects going back years.
myfonj
Good example of similar battle tested application could be also ClipX [0]. It's ten years old (untouched since release), written most likely for Windows XP, and working to this days in Windows 10. I'm absolutely addicted to it. Tried many alternatives and always came back to this gem.

(The only nuisance I ever had with it is recent clash of some Win 10 update and ClipX DiskLog plugin that causes annoying delay of clipboard item after copy. I had to disable that plugin after ten years.)

[0] http://bluemars.org/clipx/

jaxelr
+1 for clipx. Plenty of Customization, easily installable via chocolatey too.
woodrowbarlow
your "clipboard commands" feature is pretty cool. have you considered implementing a plugin API for developing new commands?

your UX on this could use some work, however. i don't want the clipboard window to always be present, and i want "paste from history" to be a process similar to the normal "paste" process.

gwbas1c
One of the things I want is a clipboard manager that removes most (or all) text formatting by default.

I'm always opening up Notepad to remove formatting.

wodenokoto
I use the URL bar for that :)
bhauer
At least in some browsers (such as those built by search engine/advertising companies), I would worry about pasting anything into the URL bar because it will be immediately sent to third-parties to assess what search terms to recommend in the suggestion box. It's probably safe to do so in some browsers. But I would recommend using a network sniffer to see what happens when you paste into the URL bar.
h1d
This. You might be sending some private text or a URL that's not supposed to be publicly known and Google will know you better once more.
yclippy
use shift when pasting and you'll get whatever is on your clipboard pasted without any styling, e.g: cmd (or ctrl) + shift + v
rando444
Right click - choose paste as plain text

aka - Ctrl + Shift + V // (Command + Ctrl + V on mac)

woodrowbarlow
this isn't available system-wide, unfortunately. it's up to the application to implement it.
Siecje
What I want is an alternative clipboard. Sometimes I need to paste two things many times and fairly frequently together.

I want a save this to my second clipboard and then be able to paste from that clipboard without changing the default clipboard.

vram22
Interesting, will check it out.

Coincidentally, I had come across pyperclip, a Python clipboard module recently, and tried it out here:

pyperclip, a cool Python clipboard module:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/08/pyperclip-cool-python-cl...

That post shows a way to use pyperclip to do a quick word and line count of any text you are working on, such as a blog post or article (as long as it is within the clipboard size limit).

h1d
Recently found 1Clipboard which is simple and seems to do the job. I find it amazing how Windows lack quality app for these tiny tasks. It's usually somehow ugly and does more than you need while not easy to do the thing you want to do.

Also wonder how none of the OS has any sort of decent clipboard manager for decades when it should be their default feature.

There are plenty to choose on Mac but Unclutter is great.