Following an update in June to Clipper, Steve Fryatt has done more work on the program, as well as related module IcnClipBrd, bringing them up to versions 0.30 and 0.20 respectively.
IcnClipBrd makes it possible to copy and paste, using the global clipboard, between writable icons on the RISC OS desktop – an ability that can rightly be seen as a glaring omission in the user interface. This was implemented in a RISC OS Select (a version of RISC OS 4) and Six, but until recently has remained missing in action in RISC OS 5 – hence the need for a module like IcnClipBrd.
The use of “until recently” there is important – earlier this year the ability finally landed in RISC OS 5.27, so if the version you are using is recent enough, you can now use Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V to cut, copy, and paste between writable icons, just as you might already be accustomed to doing in some applications, or on other operating systems.
This means that if you are using such a version, IcnClipBrd is no longer needed… or is it?
Well, it isn’t for that, which was its original intended purpose, but it can also do other handy things, such as swap the case of all the characters in a writable icon, insert the current date and time, strip an extension (denoted with a / on RISC OS) from a filename, or even strip the filename itself, leaving only the extension.
The key combinations it uses to perform those tasks, however, may clash with key combinations used by other applications – so the update to version 0.20 includes a change that will make it co-exist better with such applications, by allowing you to configure the keys used for those actions.
Clipper provides a means to save the contents of the global clipboard to disc – or to populate it with the contents of a file; the application sits on the icon bar, and clicking on it presents a small window based on a standard Save dialogue. If anything has been copied to the clipboard, you can enter a filename and drag the file icon to a suitable location on disc to save it (or even to another application), and if you drag a file to the window, it’s updated accordingly – and you can now paste the contents of that file into another application.
Version 0.30 of the application provides another method of getting the clipboard contents into a window – it can insert that content at the caret, so if an application doesn’t support pasting text in the usual way, this gets around that problem by, in effect, allowing the clipboard contents to be ‘typed in’.
Both programs can be downloaded directly from Steve’s website, as well as obtained from !Store, or the RISC OS Open Ltd third party package repository via PackMan.
