Duplicates filtered out of Clipboard history

Questions & Suggestions
1

I've been pulling my hair for three hours now, wondering why my sequential copy and paste script fails. Turns out that the KM clipboard history seems to filter out duplicates. If I want to use KM as clipboard manager, e.g. to copy and paste form entries where duplicates often occur, I need the clipboard history to be able to store duplicates.

Is there a hidden preference to disable the duplicate prevention? Ideally I could set a flag to change that behavior and turn it on and off, depending on the use case.

@peternlewis any chance to implement such a flag, or at least disable automatic duplicate prevention?

2

You could perhaps make a macro based on the idea of pushing to and popping from a stack.

Rather than choose new keystroke triggers, you might reassign Cmd-C/V/X for use with the macro – but be careful, and make the macro active only for this one application if you want to keep your macro as simple as possible.

I have found a forum post from 2016 which is relevant to this idea: Clipboard Stack Macros, by @Lantro. The author has kindly provided a rocking video to demonstrate it in use, too! I have not tried the macro.

3

Yes, something like this could work, but it is a complicated problem to solve. I'd rather not re-build something that is already built robustly into KM.

4

Not currently.

If you are writing a macro to copy things sequentially, then generally the best way is to copy each in to a variable (if it is plain text) or Named Clipboard. So

  • Copy
  • Set Variable “First Name” to “%SystemClipboard%”
  • Copy
  • Set Variable “Last Name” to “%SystemClipboard%”
  • Copy
  • Set Variable “Email” to “%SystemClipboard%”

As a bonus, that provides better documentation for what your macro is doing, as well as robustness for if you change orders of how you copy or insert the results.

5

I think for the use case you describe, where the structure is always the same, I would use a dictionary, just to decrease the number of variables floating around. For more unstructured data (as in my use case), an array variable will be a better fit.

Still a bummer that I cannot mix text and images, but that doesn't come up too often, thankfully.

6

You can use Named Clipboards for images or other non-plain text clipboards to accomplish the same task.

7

Yes, but then I would need to know in advance how many images, and which image goes into which named clipboard, etc. I cannot create named clipboards on-the-fly and assign them values, or can I?

My source data might look like this:

text image text
image text
text text text
image image
...

And I need it pasted into another document like this:

text
image
text
image
text
text
text
text
image
image
...

8

Given the convenience and power of the %JSONValue% token,
it may also be worth experimenting with building and accessing a JSON list, so that:

  1. You only need one variable,
  2. you can reference clips by index rather than by name, and
  3. you have access to list (JS Array) functions like:
    • .reverse
    • .filter
    • .findIndex
1 Like
9

Using JSON, I like it, thanks! That's why I love this forum, this might be just what I need, and I wouldn't have found it as quickly without your input :slight_smile:

1 Like