ClipCube, until very recently known as Clipbox, is a small and minimalist clipboard utility that keeps an unlimited (?), until recently up to 2000, number of clipboard items for future use. The program runs in the system tray. ClipCube lets the user decide how long it keeps clipboards on file, this is set by right clicking the program icon and choosing the Keep Items entry. The available options are keeping the item(s) until the program is exited to keeping them indefinitely. The program window or interface has settings for pinning or keeping it on top and also choosing to show a full preview of a selected clipboard item or not (by toggling the eye icon on or off). One other option is showing a time stamp beside each clipboard item, this lets a user know when the clipboard was captured.

ClipCube also supports hotkeys (see http://clipcube.wikispaces.com/Changelogs for a full list of hotkeys as they are added to each version) that ease program usage such as Enter+Ctrl+C to copy a selected clipboard item and Ctrl+Numpad[1-9]  to choose the first to ninth entry in the listed clipboard history. The latter did not work in my test of the current version (0.2.2) and additionally brings up the question of how one may be able to choose the 10th, 11th or higher numbered items in the clipboard history list.

ClipCube is GPL licensed software and does not require installation. This program is in development and the interface and options have also changed recently so this review may be outdated in some respects by the time you read it.

TyperTask is a small freeware executable that automates many common tasks. The most notable and perhaps immediately useful feature of TyperTask is that in can expand text. Often typed or repeated phrases can be automated with fewer typed letters. As a simple example one can define the “~hth” abbreviation for “Hope this helps!” (see image) saving several key strokes. This is what the program calls a Trigger. Any number of triggers can be defined and saved one per line in the program interface. The other example in the image is a trigger for an email signature. Triggers can be used to correct common misspellings by adding a trigger like “recieve=receive” and also auto completing single words like “compl=completely”

TyperTask does more than just simple text triggers and can act as a launcher with such definitions or triggers as “{Control}{Shift}{Alt}G=RUN: http://www.google.com”, where special or non-alphanumeric keys are sorrounded by {}. TyperTask also supports delays like “{Control}{Shift}{Alt}N=RUN: notepad.exe{Delay=1000}Hello! {Delay=500}World!”, here notepad is opened and the text typed in it after the specified delay (in milliseconds). This can be useful when one wants to make sure an operation (a fully loaded notepad in this case) is completed before doing anything else. The WINDOW operator brings an already open window in front or into focus, for example “{Control}{Shift}{Alt}C=WINDOW: Calculator” brings the calculator into focus. Mouse clicks are also supported, this is perhaps most useful if one wants to use a program but make sure the mouse is clicked inside of it so that its Window is activated.

A more thorough explanation is given in TyperTask’s help file (accessed via the Help menu) which includes a list of special key codes and other features such as the support for environment variables (%TEMP% for system’s temporary files folder for example) and the Remove Clipboard Formatting feature.

One notable example from the help file is very interesting for those who write (HTML) code manually. “<b=<b></b>{left}{left}{left}{left}”,  here the bold tags are completed faster and automatically but furthermore the cursor returns to in between the HTML tags ready to type the bold to be text.

XPad is a text editor with a compact interface and a good number of extra tools. The program can be run right after download with no need for an installation. The program’s menu surrounds its interface (see image).

The left hand side icons or menu are the usual New, Open File, Save, Save As, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete (the selected text), Find, Search Again, Replace and About. Of course all the usual keyboard shortcuts – Ctrl+P, Ctrl+S, etc. – apply as well.

The right hand side icons or menu is where the XPad extras can be found, they are as follows:

• Word Wrap
• Automatic Copy Selection To Keyboard
• Multiple Clipboard, if activated or pressed it will hold a configurable number of clipboard items that are automatically pasted when they are highlighted or chosen from the generated list
• Open system’s font selector
• Text format, set any of Windows, Mac, UTF-16, Arabic Characters and many more for the text document
• Filters for such tasks as removing spaces, converting HTML to text, converting tabs to spaces and more
• Encode and decode Base64, UTF-8
• Clean or remove clipboard content
• Delete file securely
• Open another instance of XPad
• Open system calculator
• Send current text as email, in my test the text was automatically copied to the email subject line with nothing in the body
• Open (default) browser, if a URL is highlighted it will be loaded otherwise a blank browser window opens
• Open an instance of Windows Explorer
• Keep XPad on top, click the pin icon

The final icon is for XPad’s configuration options. In it one can create a shortcut icon for the program, associate it with *.txt files (so all *.txt files open with XPad instead of Notepad or other system default text editor), remember last opened files and/or directory and the aforementioned multiple clipboard option. There is also a Window with a list of XPad’s hotkeys or shortcuts (see image).

XPad is just over 1MB, it is only one single *.exe file (and one *.ini file to hold its settings) and should run on all Windows versions.

ClipMan or Clipboard Manager does not require installation and is accessed via the system tray. Its options are as follows:

• Choosing a plug-in directory (None exist that I know of and the program may not be in active development so plug-ins may not happen at all)
• Keeping its interface on top and choosing its level of transparency
• Hotkeys to show and hide the interface (Ctrl+S by default), move between saved clipboard entries and choosing to send an entry to the active or current clipboard

ClipMan’s major drawback is that it doesn’t always show the contents of the clipboard but only a description of it (see image).

The program does seem to have bugs, for example pressing Enter on an entry can result in losing that item – instead of, as is supposed to happen, sending the item to the ‘current’ clipboard ready for use and pasting. Since it is not actively developed it may not really be recommendable for every day use but the available source code can perhaps be used for those interested in working with ClipMan.

The requirements are listed as “Microsoft Windows XP or Vista with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and 512 MB RAM” and one would presume Windows 7 as well. It should be noted that OrangeNote is WPF based program and that there is a Mac version available as well.

DzSoft Paste & Save is a small and simple utility that saves multiple clipbord contents. However, instead of the typical clipboard manager like Clippy, CLCL and others Paste & Save holds or saves every text clipboard in one of three note (*.txt) files in its program folder. The advantage of such a set up could be in that excerpts of text can be collected from different sources in one location. As Paste & Save automatically appends the clipboard contents into one of its three text files. One can therefore have a large collection of related notes only by having the program remain in the system tray and do nothing more than the usual Ctrl+c – and not even need to use notepad or any other text editor and forget about Ctrl+v altogether. DzSoft Paste & Save lets the user define a separator between each clipboard and using its ‘remote control’ floating bar set and choose which note file is used on the fly, without maximizing the program’s main window.
For example the excellent Clipboard Help+Spell From Donationcoder.com has a notes section that allows permanent use of commonly used notes, and more features of course, but Paste & Save simplifies collection of notes very well as well.

Just to name a few, very few, of what it can do

• Watch the clipboard
• Watch recent documents and more importantly recent apps used
• All kinds of Windows operations like shutdown and minimize
• Virtual desktops
• Scheduler
• Creating bar and menus

For anybody who is not familiar with PowerPro, it really is the most complete freeware. Be sure to follow the links on the program’s site to the Yahoo! groups listed.

There are certainly many freeware, well reviewed, useful and popular clipboard utilities available. The sadly semi-abandoned Yankee Clipper, the open source Ditto and ArsClip just to name three and of course the clipboard capabilities of the all powerful PowerPro.

Clipboard Help+Spell is nevertheless a worthy contender, if not down right winner in the category. It is simply described as

…a text-based clipboard utility

But it has many features. Among its many features is the ability to archive and delete clipboard based on configurable dates, defining hot keys for viewing, pasting and working with the stored clipboards, filtering entries to find the forgotten ones and backing up the database of collected clipboards. The features don’t stop there, an internal editor spell checks and adds text editor features to manipulate the entries as well. For example it possible to change the case of the clipboard entries within the editor, strip characters, add lines and even find and replace words using regular expressions.

A clipboard utility won’t be complete without the ability to permanently store ‘favorites’ and in this case it is only a matter of dragging an entry into the said category (see images below).

Having said all that one of the most innovative features is the ability to create ‘Virtual Folders’. This feature allows certain definable clipboards to be grouped separately. For example a preset Virtual Folder is  ‘Clips With URLs’ and the way it is defined, using SQL database conditional statements, is as follows

(Lower(ClipText) LIKE ‘%http:%’) OR (Lower(ClipText) LIKE ‘%www.%’) OR (Lower(ClipText) LIKE ‘%https:%’) OR (Lower(ClipText) LIKE ‘%ftp:%’)

in that the clipboards containing any of http, https, ftp or www will be placed as a subset of all clipboards under a separate icon (as shown in the above image).

The program’s Windows tray icon is configured such that left click, double left click, right click and double right click are all defined and show stored clips, the program’s main window, the program’s general menu and the program’s on and off toggle respectively. With Clipboard Help+Spell there is a lot to play around with and discover, well worth the support and download.