The only requirement is to install the Copy and Paste add-on for Firefox on both computers and configure them accordingly. Configuring means setting up the other computer’s IP – be it local or remote – and the port that should be used to establish the connection.

The extension provides the means to check if a connection can be established and will display the information in the configuration.

Users who want to use this extension should note that this extension will send all text that is copied to the clipboard to the other computer. There is currently no way to turn it on or off whenever that feature is needed. This could be a privacy risk as there is no information provided how the data is transferred. Our guess is that the data is transferred unencrypted which could mean that anyone monitoring the network traffic will be able to access the data.

The add-on is currently in experimental stage and the author asked explicitly for feedback for his extension. It is very likely that he will add those buttons to a later version of his add-on to increase the security. As of now the only way to deal with this is to set the add-on to inactive or remove the IPs of the second computer whenever it is not needed.

Copy Paste does have a few weaknesses though. If you copy rich text and paste it into a rich text editor the formatting will remain. The problem can be frustrating if the formatting has been used extensively and should not appear in the destination form. Lots of bold colored text does not look good in a scientific paper usually.

PureText is a small 13 Kilobyte software application for Windows that sits quietly in the Windows System Tray waiting for the user to copy text to the Clipboard. It does not convert the copied contents automatically but provides that option when pasting the contents of the Windows Clipboard.

Instead of pressing CTRL C CTRL V to copy paste the contents the user can define an alternative keyboard shortcut to paste the contents of the Clipboard without the formatting.

The default keyboard shortcut to paste the contents of the Windows Clipboard without formatting is Windows V but it can be changed to any other key combination with the Windows, Shift or Control key. Users who always want to get rid of the formatting could replace the CTRL V with that one.

PureText is compatible to most versions of Windows since Windows 95 up to Windows Vista. The copy paste software program uses roughly 3.5 Megabytes of computer memory.