If Microsoft was taking my calls, they’d know that I’ve never been happy with the way the clipboard works in Windows. My biggest complaint is its inability to “paste as text”. When you copy from a web page or a Word document (the two biggest offenders), at least some of the underlying code gets copied too. When you then paste the text+code into another application, you can get some very odd results. I often want the code stripped out, leaving just the text to be pasted in. Some programs have incorporated this feature but the place where it really belongs is in the clipboard, where all programs have access to it.
I’ve used various add-on utilities over the years to achieve this and my current application of choice is ClipboardFusion, from Jon Tackabury of Binary Fortress. This free utility offers everything I want and more, including a (paid) option to save the contents of your clipboard online, making them available to share with other computers. I especially like the ease with which you can choose to strip out the codes – which they call text scrubbing – or not. I have it configured so that highlighting a block of text and then pressing Ctrl-c copies everything, code and all, to the clipboard. However, if you press Ctrl-c twice, the text is scrubbed and no code is copied. The program is highly configurable, so that you can choose which key combinations trigger these actions.
Other text scrubbing options allow a message to be displayed in the tool tray when clipboard text has been changed, eliminate white space from the beginning or end of the text and selectively scrub HTML tags. You can also choose to play a sound when scrubbing (I’d love to find one that sounds like a squeegee).
Features not directly related to text scrubbing include:
- Text match and replace on the clipboard
- Apply macro (C#) code to the clipboard contents (très geeky)
- Specify applications in which the clipboard functions are ignored
- HotKey definitions
- The aforementioned ClipboardFusion Online
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have had the program crash on me a few times. When this happened it didn’t seem to affect anything else and I received notification that it had happened. Restarting the program from the Windows Start menu brought everything back. I am using it on my main desktop machine, running Windows 7 Professional and have not tried it on anything else. Your mileage may vary.
Overall, I’m very happy with the extra functionality that ClipboardFusion brings to the clipboard. Binary Fortress has several other useful looking utilities that I’ll be checking out soon.
Clip photo by House Of Sims.
Text transform graphic by Binary Fortress.
