Two Clipboard Managers That That Work With The Ubuntu Panel

By default, most operating systems run a fairly simple clipboard. When you copy text, it is added to the clipboard. When you paste, it is copied from the clipboard to your current document. If you later copy something else, it is copied to the clipboard and whatever had been there is now unavailable. For people who copy a great deal of text back and forth, something a bit more powerful is needed. Usually this involved installing a separate clipboard manager that has the ability to remember multiple snippets of text (plus images in some cases).

In the new Ubuntu, now featuring the Unity desktop, there are two pretty good ways of accessing your clipboard data right from the panel. The first is a program called ClipIt; the second is named Pastie. Both can be installed via a PPA (personal package archives). Here's how.

First, open up a Terminal.

You don't need to do both parts (you'll eventually choose one clipboard manager over the other), but for now we'll show you the installation procedure for both. First we'll type sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hel-sheep/pastie to add the Pastie clipboard manager.

ClipIt, on the other hand, is already a part of the software repositories (starting with Ubuntu 11.10), so no extra PPA is necessary. Once we've added the PPA to our software lists, typing sudo apt-get update will update those lists and make the software in the Pastie PPA available for installation.

Now, type sudo apt-get install pastie to install Pastie, or sudo apt-get install clipit to install ClipIt.

Note: you may also need to add python-gnome2 when installing Pastie, as it is not recognized as a requirement although Pastie will not run without it being present.

Once installed, each clipboard manager can be started from the Unity Dash.

In many important ways, both clipboard managers are similar. They both offer the ability to remember multiple clipboard items (25 by default for Pastie, 50 by default for ClipIt, although both of those numbers are configurable). As well, both ClipIt and Pastie can not only remember snippets of text you copy to the clipboard, but anything you select or highlight.

Once your clipboard is populated with items, you can select any of them by first clicking the panel icon and then clicking the item you want. You can then simply paste it into whatever document you're working in at the time.

Here is what ClipIt looks like.

Here is Pastie.

One large advantage Pastie has over ClipIt is its support of images. Let's say you just took a screenshot of your Desktop, but you don't want to save the file, because you just want to paste the image into your word processing document. In that case, instead of saving the screenshot, you could simply click the Save To Clipboard icon.

Now, look again at the Pastie image above. You'll notice an entry called "1366×768″ which is the size of the image. Select that, then paste it into your word processing document.

Instead of pasting a snippet of text, you're pasting the image, which had been stored in the clipboard.

Both clipboard managers offer nice configuration options as well. With ClipIt you have very fine-grained control over which items remain in the clipboard. This means if you were searching for an item for a birthday present and copied the text or a link to a website, you could remove that entry from the clipboard without having to delete all the entries.

Pastie, on the other hand, does not offer that level of control. You can delete the most recent entry, or the entire history, but not individual items, unfortunately (the options for this can be seen in the Pastie menu).

All in all, both Pastie and ClipIt are nice options for Ubuntu users looking for a better clipboard manager than what is present at installation. And both offer advantages: ClipIt and its nice control over the saved clipboard history, and Pastie with its image support. For the user, there's no wrong choice; both work well and are a nice improvement over the default. Your choice is likely one of clipboard history editing over image support. It's unfortunate both can't offer all the features the other does, of course, but maybe in time. Until then, both are easily installable, so interested users should have no troubles auditioning each.