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Say you are copying snippets of a word document into textedit. It is a waste of time to go back and forth for each snippet when you can do it once using concatenation into a copy-queue.
Is there a way to do this?
In case I didn't make it clear: Say you want to copy the title, then paragraph 2 sentence 1, then paragraph 7 sentence 3, etc. Typically you need to do each of these one by one, changing windows etc.
user391339
Posted 2014-09-08T17:57:17.423
Reputation: 593
2
I'm not entirely sure if I understand your question but it sounds like you're looking for a clipboard manager. You can find a list of clipboard managers for Linux on the Arch wiki.
These programs allow you to save previously copied content and choose which should be pasted. So you could copy each target sentence and then paste whichever you want. The screenshot below shows clipit in action:
terdon
Posted 2014-09-08T17:57:17.423
Reputation: 45 216
1
/bin/vi has 'named buffers'. You can yank text in each -, and paste from each - buffer.
bbaassssiiee
Posted 2014-09-08T17:57:17.423
Reputation: 1 225
1
Not sure if this still works or not but Word used to have a feature called Spike to do what I think you're asking for here.
More information can be found here :
http://lifehacker.com/5614132/use-the-spike-feature-in-microsoft-word-to-copy-and-paste-text
Mark Bowen
Posted 2014-09-08T17:57:17.423
Reputation: 11
Oh sorry I thought in the question it had mentioned OSX. – Mark Bowen – 2014-09-09T07:56:32.090
I suppose from this regard the answer might be good. Since it seems he wants a solution for OSX or Linux. I redact my first comment. Thanks – Matthew Williams – 2014-09-09T08:00:11.383
1Sounds like they want one step further, and have content automatically appended into the buffer, so they wouldn't have to do multiple pastes . . . – ernie – 2014-09-08T19:13:43.913
2@ernie I don't see how that's possible short of mind reading software. This type of software saves the last few items in the buffer and you can choose what to paste. How would the software know what to paste and where otherwise? – terdon – 2014-09-08T19:21:42.193
i am thinking of a buffer or queue that text would be added to sequentially with each copy, maybe separated by carriage return. in this system you would have a "queue-copy" command that adds text to the queue, and then a "dump-queue" or "reset-queue" command that either removes the last element or resets the queue. the queue would be reset automatically when a paste occurs, thus dump/reset-queue might be unnecessary in most cases. – user391339 – 2014-09-08T19:30:02.980
@user391339 Well, this is quite close, it just requires you to select which element from the buffer (the "paste-queue") you want to paste. Some clipboard managers will also have shortcuts that let you paste element N. Have a look at the list I gave. – terdon – 2014-09-08T19:59:40.377
@terdon I agree that the OP's request is a bit difficult to satisfy, just pointing out that this may not mitigate the switching they want to avoid. It'll make their life easier in that they can copy a bunch of different sections, but there'll still be some switching to paste them back in desired order (or using shortcuts as you've mentioned). – ernie – 2014-09-08T23:57:40.780