As a blogger and Network Administrator I need to do a lot of copy and pasting. I find myself copying huge scripts, HTML code and sometimes huge amounts of user data. During my day to day activities I need to copy screenshots and add text to show a group of people how to do something.

All this cutting and pasting along with clipping images and URL’s for posts sometimes gets all mixed up.

If I need to go back and review a link I copied earlier, chances are it has been overwritten by some 30 other tasks since. That is where ClipGuru comes in. This is an older freeware program that lets you take charge of your clipboard in ways you never imagined. If you need a powerful clipboard viewer and clipboard recorder app then read on.

Let’s take a look at ClipGuru. We will be using the standalone version (as in not installing it and can be run from a executable). You can grab the same one I did by navigating to here which will start your 387KB download.

When you finish it and run it you will see ClipGuru’s clipboard manager:

Go ahead and copy some stuff from webpages to images and back to text. You can see what I copied below and the Note/Source field on the right is auto-populated. This makes it even easier to see what’s what. I copied some code from the source of Clipguru and ClipGuru sure enough noted it in the correct column. Nice and of course you can go in and edit this field as well.

Now that you have your data captured within ClipGuru you can put it to work for you. You are able to combine selections, search through what has been captured already and edit those notes.

You can get a preview of the image you captured by simply highlighting that row like you see below:

If you captured text or code you can search inside ClipGuru for specific key words like shown below. In this example you will see I selected some HTML code I copied and then I searched within it for the word Clip. It highlights the found results just as you would expect.

According to the ClipGuru website they regularly save your open clipboard sets to prevent data loss. They also speak about false positives this program can give from a firewall product claiming that a keylogger exists. I can vouch for the software being virus/spyware free:

ClipGuru saves your clip information at regular intervals to minimize data loss should a system crash or hang occur. You may perform a manual save of your active clip sets by selecting the ‘Save Set’ button from the ClipGuru main window. Depending on the size of your sets, this could take a second or two.

ClipGuruâ„¢ contains no spyware, etc. It will attempt to access the internet only if you request help or request a version check.

If your firewall alerts you about a ‘keylogger’ or ‘hook’ when you run ClipGuru, it is because the method we use to capture the browser URL for ‘source’ information (actually, the only method we could find that works for both Internet Explorer and Firefox) utilizes a windows API call which requires us to issue a keyboard command. We assure you, no information other than the browser URL is being recorded and NO information is being sent from your computer.

All in all if you are a blogger or coder this is an application for you!

Mark also wrote about another one called ClipX but the difference with this one is that it has to be installed.

Do you use something similar? If you do let us know. Now if only there was some way you could communicate with us and the other readers”¦. Oh wait there is”¦

And it’s called the comments! How original eh?

Tagged: clipboard • productivity