Have you ever wanted to paste something you copied before restarting your machine or say you copied before couple of days? For me, I rely heavily on clipboard. It’s probably the most frequently used feature on my machines, but Windows in-built clipboard is very limited. What I mean by saying that is, it remembers only what you copied the most recently. It happens to me a lot that I copied a string or a URL before some time that I want to paste again. With windows clipboard its not possible. Its worth mentioning that Office and Visual Studio implemented such functionality but they collect copied content only from inside their application. Its not windows wide. There comes Ditto-cp.
From their website, Ditto Clipboard Manager is,
Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, .....
- Easy to use interface
- Search and paste previous copy entries
- Keep multiple computer's clipboards in sync
- Data is encrypted when sent over the network
- Accessed from tray icon or global hot key
- Select entry by double click, enter key or drag drop
- Paste into any window that excepts standard copy/paste entries
- Display thumbnail of copied images in list
- Full Unicode support(display foreign characters)
- UTF-8 support for language files(create language files in any language)
- Uses sqlite database (www.sqlite.org)
The way it works is, the tool keeps running in the background and keeps collecting all kinds of copied content in a SQLite database. When you hit a HotKey (I always configure Ctrl + Shift + V), a small window which looks something like following pops up where you can search for past copied content using keywords. For example, If I remember, the link I copied before 4 days was from amazon, I can click in the editbox at the bottom of Ditto window and type “amazon.com”, and ditto filters the content of top list with words amazon.com within it. From the filtered list, I can see what I want in my clipboard and just double click on the line I am interested in. What that will do is copy that content to current clipboard. That’s it, I can paste it to whatever application I want because my clipboard now contains that URL.
Try it out and let me know how you like it. Its one of the first tools I always install after getting a new machine. Can’t live without it. If you know any other better tool for this, leave a comment. The most important feature request for an ideal Ditto like software is, web-syncing so, content copied on one machine shows up on another machine too (magically). Of course, privacy is big issue when it goes to “Internet”!
Enjoy!