Ditto - Clipboard Manager

Screen shot? Marketing? Who knows? © Ditto

Here's a nice one for people who like to copy and paste. It's called Ditto. It keeps a history of the things you've copied to the clipboard so you can recall them for pasting later. It can handle text, formatted text, images, and probably some other stuff I haven't found yet. You can even run it on multiple networked computers and share the clipboard across them.

That's all great, but those aren't even my favorite features. My main reason for using it is to store permanent clips that I find myself using often. I personally keep some small blocks of source code in there and sprinkle them as needed in different projects. But maybe you sell stuff on eBay and you want to send the same generic cookie-cutter response to everyone who buys something from you. Or you haven't found the e-mail signature option in Outlook (among the other 82,238,927 options nobody ever uses), and you want your name/company name/number/fax/e-mail/pager/social security number/driver's license number/penis size to show up at the end of all your e-mails just like everybody else. Well, Ditto can help you there too.

It's also useful for copying multiple things from one place to another without having to switch back and forth between windows. Instead of copy/switch/paste/switch/copy/switch/paste/etc, you can just do a series of copies, switch windows, then do a series of pastes.

One recommendation: the default option is to have an unlimited clipboard history size. I haven't done any real benchmarking, but I think the performance starts to suffer as the clipboard history gets very long. Mine was up to 7000+ items, and it was taking several seconds to get the Ditto menu to pop up. I turned on some limits in the options (see screenshot below), and now it's working fast again.

- Kornhornio