In this article I am going to introduce you to the Klipper tool contained within the KDE 4.5 desktop.

Version

You may be using an earlier version of KDE, so the version of Klipper that you have access to may not be the same. If this is the case, you may be missing some features or some actions might be a bit different. The version of Klipper shipping with KDE 4.5 is version 0.9.7. To find out what version of Klipper you are using Right click the Klipper icon in your notification area and then click Help > About Klipper.

Features

• Multiple clipboard history entries.
• Actions support.
• Easy clipboard history clearing.
• User-configurable keyboard shortcuts.

And much more.

Basic usage

The basic usage is simple: You can cut and post normally as you would with any operating system (using Ctrl-c/Ctrl-v or the UNIX method of highlighting text to copy and click the middle mouse button to paste) or you can open up the Klipper history window and select what you want to paste. Let’s take a look at the steps for the latter.

1. 

   Figure 1

   Click on the Klipper icon in the notification area.

2. From the resulting pop up (see Figure 1) select which text you want to copy (once you’ve selected it, it’s copied).
3. Paste the selected text into the document you want.

Once you have copied a string of text from Klipper, that text remains in the history. This allows you to retain text that can be copied multiple times. This is a nice feature when you know there is text you need to have quick access to for multiple copy/paste instances.

Kipper history size

Figure 2

You can determine the amount of entries Klipper holds. By default it will contain only seven items. If you are a frequent copy/paster, you might want to hold more than that. To configure this click the Klipper icon in the notification area and select Configure Klipper. In this new window (see Figure 2). In the Clipboard history size change that number to how many entries you want to hold. Once you have done that, click OK to save your settings.

Actions

Figure 3

This is where the real WOW factor comes in with Klipper. With Actions you can perform various actions on selected contents of your clipboard history. All you need to do is to enable the actions in the Klipper pop up menu (see Figure 1). Once you have done that actions will be enabled. Let’s see them at work.

1. After you have enabled Actions in Klipper, Open up the Dolphin file manager.
2. Locate an image file (such as a .jpg file) and right click the file.
3. Click the Copy entry.
4. From the resulting Actions menu (see Figure 3) select which action you want to take on the now copied and selected Klipper entry.

You can also create your own Klipper actions, but this will require an understanding of the Qt regular expressions (beyond the scope of this article).

Final thoughts

Klipper is an outstanding clipboard tool. Once you start using it you will be amazed at how much you miss it when you go to other operating systems or other desktops.

You can use a simple key to add a quick note, just select any text and press ctr+shift+q. Your note will be instantly created, which you can then edit, add a subject to and save. This is not so new, a lot of apps offer this functionality, but the little things that Quotepad offers add a lot of extra to the program.

Just as an example, clicking the taskbar icon brings up a note list. Clicking it again (or double clicking) brings up the interface to add a new note. Simple, but very effective and efficient use interface. You can mark notes, have the whole window stay on top, change color schemes, change reading order, use filters to narrow your notes, Quotepad can become a great research tool, not just a copy-paste companion!

I find it very useful when I’m thinking about post ideas. Even with tools like Google Reader, it is sometimes hard to keep track of what I want to write about, and a quick copy paste into Quotepad is a big help, firstly because I can paste the intro paragraph from a blog post, or a description from the app main page. Quotepad shows the source of the text, so I can save the url copy-pasting time. I can then narrow by keyword, making all my blogging work much easier and faster.

The typical action of cutting and pasting does and should (in most cases) work across applications as well as into the command line. The trick is knowing either the key combinations or the correct mouse buttons. So whether your copying and pasting from one document to another, from document to email (or vice versa), or just about any application to any application Linux can copy and paste. Let’s find out just how.

The Mouse

This is the big one that makes your copy/paste life very simple. With the Linux operating system there are three mouse buttons: 1, 2, 3. The left mouse button is button 1, the right mouse button is button 2, and the mouse wheel is button 3. If your mouse doesn’t have a mouse wheel then pressing both 1 and 2 together is the equivalent of button 3. Now that we have that out of the way I am going to show you a nice trick. Go to a document (OpenOffice, Abiword, or even compose an email). Highlight some text by clicking button 1 and dragging the mouse over the text you want to highlight (simple text selection). Once you have selected your text click your cursor in a blank area of the document and click button 3. What you should see is the selected text is pasted where you clicked with button 3. So the action of highlighting text with button 1 is copying and clicking with button 3 is pasting. How simple is that? This action also works from document to command line and vice versa.

The Keyboard

Naturally the standard keyboard key combinations will work for copying and pasting. There are a couple of exceptions. When copying within (or to and from) some terminal windows there are different key combinations to use. For example, in gnome-terminal instead of Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v (for copy and paste) you use Ctrl-shift-c and Ctrl-shift-v for copying and pasting. This can be changed within the profile editor in gnome-terminal (if you want this feature to echo the standard combination.) Be aware, however, that if you copy text by selecting via the left mouse you can not paste by using Ctrl-v. The Ctrl-v combination (or Ctrl-Shift-v combination) only works in conjunction with the Ctrl-c or Ctrl-Shift-c combinations.

The Menu

As you can imagine nearly every Linux GUI application has an Edit menu that includes the Copy/Paste entries. These work exactly as you would expect. These menu entries also work in conjunction with the Ctrl-c/v combinations, but not the button 1 highlight action (button 1 copy action only works with the button 3 paste action).

Final Thoughts

I will warn you that once you get used to the button1/3 copy/paste action you will find yourself attempting it in all other operating systems. This method of copy/paste is the easiest means of copying and pasting content bar none. It is nice, however, that the various Linux distributions include other means for those users who prefer the standard methods.

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.

You could for instance sort through your files and move all files belonging to one group into a new folder using Piky Basket. The file operations available are copy, move and delete. This is actually another nice application. I sometimes download large image collections from sites like Flickr using an automated downloader. Instead of going through each picture I could simply add all pictures that I want to delete in the basket and delete them at the end.

I would not have to mark them all while still browsing through them. Its also great for creating a CD or DVD with files from different locations, a backup for instance.

Another option is to copy paths to the clipboard. Picky Basket can get the file paths of selected files and folders and copy them to the clipboard. Found at Freeware Genius (any news about my shoes Samer, hehe).

Update: Picky Basket is no longer offered by the developing company. The program functionality has been moved into the commercial program Copywhiz. Windows users who prefer a free solution should take a look at Smart Copy Tool which provides a similar functionality.

It can be used to display all or select files stored in a root folder and all of that folder’s subfolders. These files can then be moved, copied or deleted. The program offers additional functionality, like the ability to merge directories or to synchronize them.

He is probably not the only one who would like such functionality though and I therefor decided to write this little article that reviews the software. I prefer that a software does not install itself on my system, a unpack and go type of software and x-mouse is exactly such a type. Download the executable, run it from a location on your computer and the freeware is active. It places a small icon in the system tray.

Windows users might find the procedure to copy and paste text with the middle mouse button confusing at first but will surely love it once they get used to it. You highlight a portion of the text with the left mouse button as usual and hit the middle mouse button once the complete text is highlighted. This will copy the text to the clipboard. The next click of the middle mouse button would paste the text if the application allows it. It makes not sense to try and paste the text to the website, you need a editor for this or a form field on the website.