Reading the documentation about the Name Clipboards, it seems that it doesn't allow all files or anything we want. And judging by the simple panel inside Preferences/Clipboards, I think it's indeed limited to certain things.
Here's what I want to do: I have this file that's 200MB and I would like to save it as a clipboard "element" that I can then easily paste by just using the Trigger Macro by Name. So I would just basically go to the Finder window I want, Trigger Macro by Name, find the macro that would find and copy that file and hit Enter to paste it there.
I tried dragging it to the clipboard panel, but KM just stopped working, so that's not the way to do it, I guess...
Is the Named Clipboard what I should use? If not, how can this be achieved (if possible at all)?
It seems that I needed to save the path inside the panel, instead of dragging the file itself. @peternlewis maybe dragging and dropping a file to the panel could automatically create the path?
This suggestion was for the Clipboards panel inside Preferences. When you drag a file there, it would create the path to the file. Right now it seems that's reading the file itself and that's why a 200MB file crashed KM (I guess).
This is not an image. It's a Logic file.
I tried the Read a File action, but it seems that's limited to text and images, right? At least, that's what's mentioned on that article you shared. I got an error:
Is there a similar approach, but for any type of file without KM storing that file?
All I need is KM to find a file in Finder, copy it to the System Clipboard, then paste it and, as you suggested, remove it from the clipboard.
@peternlewis I think I found the answer. Can you please confirm if this is the right way to do it? I'm not an AppleScript expert (not even a beginner I would say) so I can't say if this is the right approach...
Can you confirm this script is correct? It's working and it pastes the file, but just wondering if it's well written, because I merged 2 different suggestions into 1.
It shouldn't crash Keyboard Maestro, but it's not a good idea.
I couldn't store a file reference at that point, since that is not the expectation for a clipboard or an image from a drag, the expectation is that it is stored as the data contained in the drag, not a reference to something that might change later.
Beats me. It looks ok, but I'm no AppleScript expert.
You probably don't need to delete the clipboard if it is just a file reference.
I was saying this, because when I used the action to paste to named clipboard, I got the path to that file. At least that's what I get (visually speaking):
So I was assuming it was just copying the path.
I just want this to be a temporary clipboard item so if I already copied some text, for example, before moving the file, I will still have that text available as my item 0 once the file is moved.
Not that there's anything wrong with AppleScript, but Keyboard Maestro runs it a trifle slowly – so you'll get better performance from something like this.
