Although the Windows Clipboard is a great idea, even with Windows 7 it’s not what you would call feature rich. Copy something like a block of text or an image, and that’s about it, one piece of data in, the same one out. With the sheer amount of multitasking most people do in Windows these days, how useful would it be to have more than one actual item in the clipboard at once? With Windows alone you’re out of luck, but thankfully there are programs out there to greatly enhance what the Clipboard can do and help make it a much more functional part of your system.
One such utility to actually bring the clipboard functionality a bit more up to date is ArsClip, which monitors the clipboard and records multiple entries as opposed to just the one Windows offers. It also adds several options to enhance the clipboard even further making it much easier to keep track of and use multiple entries.
Some of its features:
– Configurable Hot key to access the program
– Create new groups using the Permanent Clips menu option.
– Append and merge clips, either before or after capture.
– Directly paste the image to an opened image editor or the text to the text editor.
– Instruct the tool not to copy any non-text item which is larger than specified size.
– Picture, RichText, File Copy, Unicode, HTML support
– Form Mode for pasting multiple fields
– Windows 7 Jumplist support (If you pin the program to the Taskbar)
Version 4.0.0 of the program was released not too long ago and the website lists some new features including; Expandable Menus, new Clip Menu window for editing clips, drag-and-drop reordering and Menu key/Application key/Delete key support.
The program actually comes with both the setup and a portable version in the zip file so it’s your choice to which way you wish to use it. Run the utility and it will display an icon in the system tray and will wait for you to send something to the clipboard. By default 15 items will be stored although this number can be increased to 100 items by right clicking the tray icon, going to Configuration >> Clipboard >> History >> And increasing the store number.
Once data is in the clipboard you can simply view the history by pressing the default Hotkey combination of Ctrl+Shift+Z. A small window will pop up with the history contents of the clipboard for you to select:
If you are typing in a document just press the number key of the desired clipboard text, or use your mouse / arrow keys, and it will be inserted at the cursor position. To empty the contents of the clipboard partly, or completely, simply right click the tray icon or use the ‘System’ menu in the popup and use the ‘Flush‘ options.
Another useful function is the ‘Permanent Clips‘ option which allows the creation of strings of text you use often like email or home address, or maybe predefined sentences or paragraphs. These can then be accessed with a similar keystroke from the popup menu or a custom hotkey combination.
The tray has a few options through the right click which can also be found in the popup menu such as; Program configuration, permanent clips, flushing and editing the Clipboard contents and its history. Left click the tray icon and you will get a thumbnail of what the current clipboard item is.
There are plenty of configuration options like changing the hotkey combinations, Changing clipboard options depending on the program and altering the formatting of the copied text and many more.
Hopefully one day Microsoft will get around to making the Windows Clipboard a lot more functional, but until then, something like ArsClip is on hand to make things a bit easier.
Compatible with XP, Vista and Windows 7 32 and 64bit