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The weight of the clipboard

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Re: The weight of the clipboard

#11

Post by jraph »

smasher164 wrote: post #4

I've overwritten my clipboard multiple times by accident, so I think that weight is the fear of losing what I copied. To be honest, the clipboard bears the weight of so much productivity, even though by default, its functionality is pretty limited. It's the poor man's IPC, after all.

You could use a clipboard manager to get rid of that weight. KDE comes with Klipper, which remembers the last N things you copied, and makes this N configurable (I do increase the default). It also provide a lot of nice features too, like search in the history, make the copied text into a QR Code or invoke an action on the copied text, make a preview entry the current one.

I feel limited without a clipboard manager now.

Re: The weight of the clipboard

#12

Post by james-bcn »

I think it's because when you copy something to clipboard you are also putting a note in your short term memory about it. Our short term memory isn't very good, with only a few slots for storage. A way around this could be for a mini-image of the contents of the clipboard to be displayed in a corner of the screen somewhere.

Re: The weight of the clipboard

#13

Post by jarenmf »

gorgoiler wrote: post #5

Unify your vim clipboard with the system clipboard, they said. The integration is wonderful, they said. Well: 1/ copy URL from browser 2/ alt tab to vim notes 3/ delete old URL from notes 4/ paste new URL but get the old URL instead?! How do I do the FORTH equivalent of swapping the two items on the top of the stack (and have a stack in the first place)? :)

If usually delete to another register to avoid that, "dd for example :)

Re: The weight of the clipboard

#14

Post by spectaclepiece »

gorgoiler wrote: post #5

Unify your vim clipboard with the system clipboard, they said. The integration is wonderful, they said. Well: 1/ copy URL from browser 2/ alt tab to vim notes 3/ delete old URL from notes 4/ paste new URL but get the old URL instead?! How do I do the FORTH equivalent of swapping the two items on the top of the stack (and have a stack in the first place)? :)

After reading this my mind went to the same place of viewing the clipboard as a stack. Wonder if that’s possible system-wide.

One solution I have in vim which I always forget to use is adding an additional d or p to use a secondary paste buffer:

vnoremap dd "ad

nnoremap ddd "add

nnoremap pp "ap

Re: The weight of the clipboard

#15

Post by normie3000 »

jarenmf wrote: post #13
gorgoiler wrote: post #5

Unify your vim clipboard with the system clipboard, they said. The integration is wonderful, they said. Well: 1/ copy URL from browser 2/ alt tab to vim notes 3/ delete old URL from notes 4/ paste new URL but get the old URL instead?! How do I do the FORTH equivalent of swapping the two items on the top of the stack (and have a stack in the first place)? :)

If usually delete to another register to avoid that, "dd for example :)

Doesn’t dd delete the line under the cursor?

Re: The weight of the clipboard

#16

Post by awinter-py »

like all external brains, the clipboard forces you to confront 'thinking without knowing', which can be dissonant and slow, and requires browse and search strategies rather than leaping to conclusions.

john crowley's little big is sort of about this

Re: The weight of the clipboard

#18

Post by geocrasher »

I stopped worrying about it when I installed the Ditto clipboard Manager[0]. It keeps everything, so don't have to keep track of what I copied in my short term memory. I offloaded that task to the computer. Turns out they're good at that kind of thing.

I wrote about it back in 2016 on my very ugly website: https://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2016/02/clipboard-manager/

[0]https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/

Re: The weight of the clipboard

#20

Post by avnigo »

aaron695 wrote: post #2

Insightful. I would say it's the Zeigarnik effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect I find Clipboard managers remove this. Since putting it into the queue is a whole task.

Indeed, it is the weight of having something interrupted or unfinished. Putting it in a clipboard manager feels like the task is no longer weighing on your working memory, and it completes the first part by reaching a checkpoint.
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