Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Ditto Clipboard Manager

For about the last year I've been using ClipX which is a clipboard manager. This worked well-ish with a few minor annoyances but seems to have been languishing in a vacuum of non-development and stagnation. Recently a friend put me on to the Ditto Clipboard Manager which I've installed on to a number of machines that I use and I absolutely love it and recommend that you install it immediately.
I've tested Ditto on Windows XP (32 bit), Server 2003 (32 bit) and Server 2008 (64 bit) and it works perfectly on all those machines. Today I was chastised by Ninja Camp for not blogging about this utility and spreading the wealth of knowledge so here is that post. Ninja Man tried to install it on Vista earlier today and he reported initial problems and I haven't heard back from him on this so not sure if he got it working or not. Hopefully he'll comment here on his progress.

One of the other utilities that I had running on one of my computers was Pure Text. This little applet allowed you to strip formatting from text when you paste it. You know when you copy something from a word document or a web page and you want to paste it without that bold and color? Well Pure Text does this for you. However, and this is a big however, you no longer need this utility if you're using Ditto. One of the features of Ditto is to paste any of your clippings as "Paste Plain Text Only" which is a real Godsend.
The default keyboard combination to launch Ditto is Ctrl + ` which I suggest you don't change even if you find it uncomfortable at first. I promise that this will grow on you very quickly.

4 comments:

  1. That's NinjaCamp...get the branding right :). It does work on Vista x64 and 7 x64 however I've had some odd problems getting it to work inside of the Google Chrome address bar. I think it's just a bit finicky when it comes to pasting...

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  2. Apologies for dropping that space between ninja and camp. Thanks for the feedback. Plan on installing Windows 7 x64 this weekend and so will be able to try it on there as well.

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  3. I think the problem with pasting into chrome is that it looses focus so ditto doesn't know where to paste. Not sure what the solution is.

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  4. I don't know what I would do without Ditto. This is the best productivity tool out there for programmers and DBAs.

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