Red Green Repeat Adventures of a Spec Driven Junkie

Productivity Tool: Clipboard Managers

Clipboard managers can make you more productive and efficient when copying-pasting different texts and save copied texts for later retrieval.

I show situations how clipboard managers can make you more efficient.

You will save time and make you more efficient when doing copy related tasks.

This article will take you about three minutes to read.

Pair of Ear Clips Composed of Fused Discs source and more information

Introduction

Have you ever encountered situation: “I copied that line before” or “All I do is copy and paste data between two applications” ?

Like going through this loop when using your computer?

  1. copy text
  2. move to new location
  3. paste text
  4. copy new text
  5. move to new location
  6. past new text
  7. repeat until done

Or thought:

I just copied that text from somewhere sometime ago, where’s the source again??

Well, if you were ever annoyed or frustrated with by either of those, you can solve those problems easily by getting a Clipboard Manager!

Clipboard Manager??

Yes, a clipboard manager. It’s a piece of software that gives you more clipboards.

In the example above, the work flow can become:

  1. copy text
  2. copy new text
  3. move to new location
  4. move to new location
  5. paste text
  6. past new text
  7. repeat until done

If the location is the same, you would just: copy, copy, copy, move, paste, paste, paste.

Wondering if you ever could get text you copied before? With a clipboard manager, when you need to reuse a piece of text copied from the past, day, week, month, with a clipboard manager, look it up!

The clipboard manager stores old items copied and you use that instead of looking for the original source to copy.

Efficiency

Copy-Paste is a revolution of the computer, at the same time, when one needs to copy-paste multiple items at once, the computer operator becomes a slave: copy, paste, copy, paste, (repeat)

With a clipboard manager, the computer does what it does best: remember data. You, the operator, just do what you do best: direct.

Try it

There are free clipboard managers

Wow - there are more clipboard managers than I expected out there!

How I Utilize Clipboard Managers

As a developer, the main ways I have used clipboard managers for work:

  • Storing UNIX commands
  • Keeping code snippets

UNIX Commands

I keep a long history of items I copy. The best is when I have a useful UNIX shell script copied and keep it there. When I need it again, I just look for it in the clipboard manager instead of typing it out.

Code Snippets

Having a template of code whenever I’m working on production to keep things moving quickly helps. Especially as I iterate through developing the code.

Password Manager

One area where using a clipboard manager is NOT a good idea is with a password manager, like BitWarden, 1-Pass, LastPass, etc.

You do not want to have past copies of you password in there, just in case another user can get access to your passwords.

In your clipboard manager, look for options to NOT store when copying from your password manager. Otherwise, you may have a bad time.

Conclusion

Having a clipboard manager is such a game changer. Once I got CopyClip and used it for a couple of months, I upgraded to CopyClip2 for the search functionality. I’m just in love with having a clipboard manager. I cannot go back to a single use clipboard built into most computers

Wow - I started this article just writing about the macOS clipboard manager and didn’t think of having a clipboard manager on my mobile device. Now I gotta get a clipboard manager for my phone too!