Concepts

Clips

Anything that can be copied to the clipboard can be considered a clip. Clips can consist of plain text, formatted text, image data, or a reference to a file.

Clips are very versatile. They can consist of just a few characters or an entire Wikipedia article. This makes it possible to use them for any purpose.

You can store a phone number or hyperlink, write notes with text and images, save code snippets for easy access, or frequently used templates to share with your co-workers.

Clips are stored as files. You can use your existing cloud storage providers, such as Google Drive or Dropbox. As such, they are automatically shared with co-workers who have access to those folders.

Types of clips

To understand how ClipClip works with different types of clips, it’s important to make a distinction based on the underlying files.

Temporary Clips (a.k.a latest clips)

Temporary clips are created when you copy something to your clipboard. These clips are stored locally in a hidden folder and are encrypted for your privacy. They cannot be accessed directly using File Explorer or equivalent file manager applications.

Saved Clips

These clips are stored locally on your hard drive. A very important attribute is that these are regular files. As such, users can create or edit saved clips using any compatible third-party editor.

Cloud Clips

These clips are links to files hosted in the cloud, which may need to be synchronized.

Lists

These are lists of clips that function much like folders. However, the main difference is that clips within them are, by default, sorted in the opposite direction of the latest clips. In other words, the last clip added will be at the bottom of the list instead of at the top. Also, since these clips are stored in memory and not as files on the hard drive, they can be manually sorted. This allows users to easily copy and paste lists of items without changing their natural order.

Creating Lists

When a new List is created, you will be prompted for a name unless you used the SHIFT option to apply default options. The default suggested name is "List", followed by a sequential number if a list by this name already exists. F.i. “List 2”.

Within the Manager
You can select clips from the Manager and use (a) the right-click context menu item “Create List” or (b) by dragging the clips to the Lists leaf in the navigation tree.


Using the “Create List” Action
If you want to create a List by copying a number of clips individually, you can activate this option by selecting any text and activating the Action. Anything you subsequently copy will be saved into the List rather than directly into the Saved Clips. If you finish your selection, you can either call this Action again for a new list or you can start pasting items. Once you paste any clip, the action is interrupted, and new clips will appear within the Latest Clips again.


Using the “Split” Action
You can use the Split Action to convert any regular list into a List based on a delimiter of your choice. You could use this function to create a List out of CSV (comma-separated values) content by using a comma or semicolon as the delimiter.


Supported formats
ClipClip auto-detects certain types of Lists and may create them automatically when you copy, for instance, multiple rows within a single column of a spreadsheet.

Using Lists

Lists work similarly to Latest Clips. You can think of them as folders for Latest Clips.

Pasting a List
You can use the Paste Menu to access the list as a whole or to select one of the items within it.


Saving a List
You can convert a List into a folder in your Saved Clips, but remember that since the clips will be stored as files, there are certain limitations. Most importantly, since folders can only be sorted by file characteristics such as name or creation date, any custom order you assign will be lost.

Updated on: 01/03/2023