Motor said:
Using XP. Is there a way to limit the length of time an item is
retained/visible in the clipboard? I'm not seeing anything in the
'Help' menu, except the item will remain until deleted (by me) or
replaced.
You need a 3rd party clip manager for that. For example, I use Clipmate
and set expirations: how long clips stay in the Inbox (where they first
go) before going into the Overflow folder (to keep performance
responsive by not have a huge Inbox), when clips expire and go into the
Trash folder, and how long before the Trash folder gets emptied.
There are lots of clip managers. Some are free, some not. Clipmate is
payware but has a trial. ClipMagic used to be free but went payware.
They have a trial version, too. Alas, they didn't resolve some problems
I reported in ClipMagic, like it blocked EVERYWHERE the use of the
underscore character ("_"), until it went commercial. Clipmate is $35
and ClipMagic is $30 (on sale for $15 - seems to always be on sale).
Both can be got for free if you're willing to dive into a TrialPay
scheme: you agree to participate in some trial and you get Clipmate or
ClipMagic for free. Just be sure to get into a trial offer than you can
cancel before the trial expires and you end up paying for something you
don't want. That's how I got Clipmate for free. As I recall, I used
the Lifelock trial and cancelled at 25 days. You don't have to wait for
the trial to end. As soon as you accept the trial offer, you get
e-mails giving you the download link and registration code for a free
copy of Clipmate (I assume it works the same for ClipMagic). It works
by having the owner of the trial offer kick back some money to ClipMate
(or ClipMagic) rather than pay for ad space on their web sites. The
site gets to stay clean, the advertisers get hooked to users that are
more likely to go past the trial and pay, and users can opt to pay for
the product or use the trialpay scheme. You just have to watch what
trial you pick and be damn sure to read the terms.
You can ask the folks in the alt.comp.freeware newsgroup for
recommendations on free clip managers; however, a lot of them have
barely more functionality than does the Windows Clipboard. Often all
they have more is a history of clips from which you can change which is
the active one to get pasted. You don't get any expiration function,
just FIFO cleanup. The intent of clip managers that have history is to
keep them for awhile and prevent getting overwritten in the clipboard.
You mention a clip disappearing in a few seconds. Clipmate lets you
expire clips at some number of days (1 day is the minimum). You elect
expiration by max number of items in its Inbox, max length in days, or
never (useful for "safe" collections where you want to clip sets of
clips indefinitely, something I use to hold canned replies for all the
users that keep asking the same questions over and over in the
newsgroups).
These are clip managers and assume you want to keep clips around for
awhile. After all, how many times have you entered something in a web
page, hit submit, something screwed up, and when you hit the Backspace
button all your effort is lost because all the fields are blank? You
can also create groups of clips, and they can be permanent (never
expire). Very useful to keep around info you want to revisit later. If
you want something to wipe your Windows clipboard at much shorter
intervals (seconds instead of days), you'll need to find a clipboard
cleanser. That means the Windows clipboard won't be of much use since
what you put there is gone almost immediately.
There are utilities that will clear the Windows clipboard (not the
histories in the separate 3rd party clip managers) whenever you choose.
For example, CrapCleaner (later renamed to CCleaner) lets you delete
lots of stuff from your host, including wiping the Windows clipboard.
If you don't want to load CCleaner and do everything manually, you can
create a shortcut (to put on your desktop or in a toolbar in the Windows
taskbar) that runs ""C:\Program Files\CCleaner\CCleaner.exe" /auto".
That way, when you feel it's time to do some cleanup, just click on the
shortcut. However, if you use a 3rd party clip manager, it copies
(intercepts) what goes into the Windows clipboard so it will still have
a copy of all clips that had previously gone into the Windows clipboard.
There is a weak clipboard manager in Windows XP called Clipbook Viewer
(book, not board). As I recall, you could store multiple clips within
it. See:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-xp/help/setup/open-clipbook-viewer
and look like:
http://bestnetguru.com/winxp/clipbook_viewer.gif
It was so crappy, however, that it took only a couple minutes until I
decided I needed a non-Microsoft clip manager.
I notice if I copy something from a password manager it
stays for a matter of seconds. If I use the Prt Scr key to copy a
webpage it stays much longer. I'm thinking the time limit can be set
by a program but not ME? Thank you for insight.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms648709(v=vs.85).aspx
While I see a lot of set functions, I don't see a remove function
specified to either the latest item or currently selected item. I only
saw an empty function that clears out the entire set of clips.
Since these functions are available to any process, your password
program can clear the Clipboard, too. There's no expiration of clips in
Windows' own clipboard. You or a process has to clear the clipboard if
you don't want them there anymore.
