For one reason or another, I occasionally need to run Internet Explorer from the command line - maybe a script, maybe a shortcut, whatever. Good luck finding documentation on the available command line arguments for it, though, and iexplore doesn’t respond to “/?” or anything.
After posting about several clipboard management software packages I’d tried that didn’t quite meet my needs, I got some great comments from readers and tried out a few suggested packages.
I finally ended up with ClipX - it does everything I was hoping for.
Installed and loving it so far.
Here’s the interface working inline - hit the “alternate paste” key (by default Ctrl-Shift-V) to bring this up and select a clip to paste in…
And here’s the tray menu where you can just select the clip to make active without actually having to paste anything…
I’m digging it. Check it out.
More a reminder for me than anything… last week I was having a hell of a time getting my Pocket PC to sync up. I’m not sure what happened - one second it was working, then it disconnected and wouldn’t reconnect again. Rebooted and no luck. I ended up figuring that something weird happened to the drivers (it kept registering as an “unknown device”).
But where do you get the USB drivers for Pocket PC?
This is what I ended up using and it seems to support a load of models (including my ViewSonic V37). Now I’m back in business.
For those who haven’t jumped neck deep in PowerShell, it’s a pain to generate GUIDs. That GuidGen app that comes with Visual Studio is a pain.
Everyone’s chipped in their own three-line GUID command-line generator, but I wrote one that fits my needs, so I figured I’d post it.
How’s it different? Mine emulates the formatting for all of the available formats in standard GuidGen (though, admittedly, I don’t use the C++ formats like IMPLEMENT_OLECREATE so someone will have to tell me if what I’m doing is messed up) and it lets you create multiple GUIDs at once. The entire output gets copied to the clipboard, too, so if you just generated 15 GUIDs and you need to paste them into a file, you don’t have to copy each individually or generate 15 separate GUIDs.
I didn’t bother even including a readme or anything with this because it’s dead simple.
Download GuidGenConsole 2.0.0 Download GuidGenConsole 2.0.0 Source
UPDATE: Based on comments from readers and trying a few suggestions out, I ended up going with ClipX, a free product that does exactly what I’m looking for.
Clipboard manager, clipboard organizer… whatever you call it, what I went searching for yesterday was something that would help me with multiple copy/paste selections so I could re-use earlier items I’d copied. (In my case, I was doing several commits to source code repositories - fixing the same thing in different versions of software, so I wanted identical log messages but didn’t want to keep all of them in Notepad or whatever.)
Office comes with a clipboard manager but it only works when an Office program is running and, frankly, it’s not my favorite. I can’t put my finger on why - all I know is I see that thing and I’m instantly confused. Maybe I’m just uninitiated.
For the record, there is one feature missing from every single clipboard manager I’ve tried: I want to be able to select an item from the list and automatically have that replace whatever is currently on the clipboard. Every single one of these keeps track of what you put on the clipboard, but if you want to put one of the saved clips into your application, you have to double-click it and let the application do the “paste” action for you. I don’t want that. I want to be able to select the clip, then go back to whatever application and hit Ctrl-V myself. Trying to make sure the app the clipboard manager is going to do the paste in is the correct app is cumbersome and almost more trouble than it’s worth.
If someone knows of a [preferably free] clipboard manager that allows you to select an item and have it become active on the clipboard, let me know. If it’s good enough, I’d even consider paying for it. That’s how much I want that feature.
Oh, and several clipboard managers I came across use databases to store their stuff. No thanks. I don’t need another service running just to help manage my clipboard. I want this thing to be lightweight and self-contained.
Anyway, when I went searching I found a few different products. Here’s what I came out with:
LW-Works
Clipboard Recorder: This
is the one I’m currently using. There are two “views” for it - this
little floating window (pictured) and a larger window that allows you to
select one of the clips and preview it. It has support to preview
several data types on the clipboard and is fairly configurable. You can
set it up to show with a Windows hotkey, you can specify what sorts of
things you want to be able to keep on the clipboard list, you can allow
(or not) duplicate clippings from the same application… it’s pretty
good. I like the detail with this one - two views, the primary view
being a super-compact window that conserves space but isn’t so small
it’s unusable; the fact it puts the icon of the application it grabbed
the clip from right next to the clip; the fact it minimizes instead of
closes if I hit the “X” button in the corner of the main window. If it
had the selected-item-in-list-is-active-on-clipboard feature, this would
be The One.
There is a free version and a professional version. The free version has anything you need for a general clipboard manager. The professional version adds the ability to have multiple clipboard lists, save lists for later retrieval, send clipboard items to another computer, and paste multiple items at the same time to an application.
Clipboard.NET:
This is an open source project that is fairly young but is shaping up to
have some nice features. The notion of having a plug-in framework for
the clipboard monitor is appealing to me, and this has that. Several of
the features (“Paste As HTML,” “Google This,” etc.) are implemented as
plugins, and that’s cool. The UI could use a little help as it is fairly
large to have running all the time and has a lot of wasted space. There
are a lot of options that could be added as well. Unfortunately, I spoke
to the author and he doesn’t have much time to dedicate to this lately,
so unless someone else steps up, we may not see this come to fruition.
Ditto:
This is a pretty popular open source project that has a lot of features.
Too many features, in fact. So many, I almost can’t even tell you what
the thing can do. I mean… well, let me show you, rather than tell
you:
Notice how there are six tabs’ worth of options? Each tab has the
bajillion options on it that you see here. The working of the
application is about this complex. Maybe it’s just me - I bet this thing
would do all I need it to if I could only wade through all the options
and figure out how to get it to work.
It feels like this started out cool but ended up with huge feature-creep. Definitely by programmers for programmers. My mom would never be able to figure this out. And, honestly, I’m not eager to personally take something like this on.
So there you have it. I haven’t yet found “the perfect clipboard manager.” Like I said above, though - if someone has one that they think can satisfy me, I’d love to hear about it. Leave me a comment with a link so I can try it out. The key feature - in fact, it might have the worst UI ever but this feature would make it worth it - is to select an item and have that become the active clipboard item. None of these do that.