The ClipView Suite of Clipboard Utilities for OS/2 Warp and ECS

By Dave Saville

I don't know about you, but I always seem to want to paste what I clipped or cut three operations back :-) So I wrote the ClipView Suite of utility programs for clipboard viewing, setting and printing under OS/2 Warp and eCS.

ClipView itself is based, but is not a port, on the Unix program "cutview".

Please note that these are text utilities.



The above image shows ClipView with five clips showing. It can have from one to a maximum of twenty one clips. The clip that matches the current clipboard text contents is denoted by the > symbol on the leftmost row button. To change the current contents of the clipboard just click on the left most button of another row. The rows marked with a locked padlock can still be put into the clipboard, but will never be overwritten. The unlocked rows are overwritten by write operations to the clipboard and are overwritten using a LRU (Least Recently Used) algorithm. Just toggle the padlock to change the clips state.

You can double click a saved clip and edit it or edit it in place. You can even set ClipView into 'Clip Append' mode where it keeps accumulating clips in one row. So, for example, you can go through some document clipping items of interest and then when you are finished dump the lot to a file, paste it into another document or print it out. You can also remove line feeds or all trailing white space from a clip as well as wrapping the text at N characters. Useful for when you have been clipping from web pages where the text often turns out to be one humungous line.

A useful feature is 'Create URL Objects'. When this option is selected and you clip something that ClipView thinks looks like a URL it will create an URL object on the desktop (by default). ClipView decides if it looks like a URL if it starts with:


 * http:
 * https:
 * ftp:
 * irc:

You can configure ClipView to open an URL as defined above, and additionally starting "www", in your currently running browser. This can be inactive, automatic or manual.

People are always requesting that ClipView does yet another "process" to the clips it holds. After discussion at Warpstock Europe 2005, I implemented a new feature where one can define ones own. This would be an external program or command file that reads stdin and writes stdout. ClipView will pass a selected clip to that process and capture the stdout in another clip.

Here is an example ClipProcess file that would be placed in the same directory as your .ClipSave file. This assumes that perl.exe is on your PATH.

ROT13|perl.exe -pe tr/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/ Upper Case|perl.exe -ne "print uc" Lower Case|perl.exe -ne "print lc" Title Case|perl.exe -ne "$_=ucfirst lc;s/(\s\W*)(\w)/$1\u$2/gs;print"

ClipView supports up to 21 clips - if you need more, simply start another copy. It co-exists with all other clipboard viewer/utilities as far as I know.

If there is something you often need to paste into things, your email address for example, then you can set it into a locked clip. Another way, to make it a one click operation is as follows:

Create a command file for 'echo "your email address here" | pipeclip' Put a shadow of the command file on the desktop or xcentre. Run the command and you can then paste immediatly.

CV_Client_*** & CV_Server_*** programmes allow clips to be shared across machines.

CV_Client_Linux & CV_Server_Linux are considered Beta code. Linux versions require xclip to be on PATH.

The Clipview suite of programs consists of:

ClipView v3.6
 * Gives multiple text clipboards. Clips may be printed, edited, saved to a buffer and locked. Optionally the entire set of clips and their state can be saved across invocations of ClipView.

ClipPrint v1.2
 * Prints the current text contents of the clipboard.

PipeClip v2.3
 * Used on the command line to pipe output to the clipboard. eg dir /w | pipeclip

Used on the command line to pipe input from the clipboard. eg clippipe | someprogram
 * ClipPipe v1.0

Used on the command line to wait till something is written to the clipboard.
 * ClipWait v1.0

To share clips across machines.
 * CV_Client_OS2 v2.2

To share clips across machines.
 * CV_Server_OS2 v2.2

To share clips across machines.
 * CV_Client_WIN v2.2

To share clips across machines.
 * CV_Server_WIN v2.2

To share clips across machines.
 * CV_Client_Linux v2.2

To share clips across machines.
 * CV_Server_Linux v2.2

National Language Support (NLS)
NLS is implemented as of the 3.1 release.

VOICE Review
A Review of ClipView 2.9 By Keith Merrington in the April 2005 edition of VOICE.

Downloads
ClipView 3.3 implemented context sensitive help via the F1 key. If you use xwpwidgets then you must get the latest 0.7.3 release from Hobbes or Netlabs to avoid a crash.

Please note that ClipView no longer uses the EMX GCC compiler, but the Innotek one. You will need the latest libc dll.


 * ClipView Suite Version 3.6

Additional files for NLS
Just download and unzip into the same directory as ClipView.exe.


 * Dutch Version 3.4
 * German Version 3.4
 * French Version 3.3
 * Swedish Version 3.3

If you would like to help and translate ClipView into your language then please first download this, unzip it, run it and send me the output. It dumps all your locale information to STDOUT. So run as locale_dump > somefile. There is no sensitive data in the dump.