Best free clipboard replacements
The two most useful utilities on my PC
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By
Ian "Gizmo" Richards
I have dozens of utilities installed on my PC — but I'd like to tell you about two that are not well known, yet top the list of my favorites. These specialist tools are not for everybody, but if they apply to you, discovering them is going to make your day. |
Freeware lets two PCs share a keyboard and mouse
I normally work simultaneously with two PCs whose screens are stacked one above the other. It's a highly productive arrangement: while one machine is tied up doing something, I can use the other to continue working.
This setup works amazingly well, because I control both PCs from the one keyboard and mouse, using an open-source freeware program called Synergy.
Synergy is like an electronic keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switch. With a KVM, you swap your keyboard and mouse from one PC to the other by manually turning a switch. With Synergy, you just move your mouse to switch control between the two systems.
It works like this: if I'm using my laptop, I move the mouse to the top of the laptop screen, and the cursor miraculously appears on the monitor mounted above that belongs to the second PC. Automatically, the laptop mouse and keyboard are connected to my second PC.
It may sound like a miracle, but the explanation is quite simple. Synergy senses when the cursor is at the screen edge and switches the mouse and keyboard electronically. In other words, it uses my local area network to make the connection rather than a set of KVM cables.
But Synergy is more than an electronic KVM. The program allows me to cut and paste between PCs, a feature I use all the time. It also synchronizes screensavers and can even sync screen-locking of both PCs.
Synergy is a true freeware gem.
Industrial-strength text processor saves work-hours
Every time I use TextPipe Pro (TPP), I silently thank the developer. This product has saved me so much time and so much angst over the years that I can hardly imagine what my computing would be like without it.
Yet most folks have never heard of TextPipe Pro.
It's a pricey commercial utility designed to process text files. TPP can extract text elements, replace them, modify them, combine them, compare them, and do much more.
If you know Unix, you could consider TPP a combination of the UNIX awk and grep utilities, but bundled with a good graphical user interface. That's a pretty accurate description, but not very understandable by Windows users. Maybe I could say TPP is like a search-and-replace utility on steroids, but that would dramatically understate the product's power.
The best way to describe TPP to Windows users is by an example.
Let's say a colleague sends you an e-mail containing a list of names and e-mail addresses of folks who want to join a national social club. Your job is to write to each person who lives in your state.
Now, doing this by hand would be a pain. Doing it using normal computing tools would be even worse. You'd have to copy and paste each e-mail and physical address into a spreadsheet and then sort the spreadsheet by state.
That's OK for a dozen names, but impractical with 50 or more. Using TPP, it would be a one-minute job — regardless of the number of names on the list.
Simply copy and paste the original e-mail into TPP and use one of the program's hundreds of preconfigured filters to extract only the lines containing the state in question. Then use other preconfigured filters to extract the e-mail addresses, sort the results alphabetically, delete duplicates and blank lines, and write the results to a file.
I just tried it and it took me 52 seconds. Not bad, eh? The results would be much the same whether there were 10 addresses or 10,000.
The key to TPP's usefulness is its flexibility. Before I discovered TPP, I wrote custom, one-off computer programs to perform tricky text-processing tasks. Not anymore. In fact, I don't think I've written a custom program in the past two years.
If you work with large text files, you are simply wasting your time if you're not using TPP. At $399, the program is expensive — perhaps the most expensive utility I have ever bought — yet in time saved, it has retuned me that investment many times over.
If you're interested in the dozens of other utilities I use on my personal PC, you'll find a full list in my Desert Island Utilities report.
Ian "Gizmo" Richards is senior editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He was formerly editor of the Support Alert Newsletter, which merged with Windows Secrets in July 2008. Gizmo alternates the Best Software column each week with contributing editor Scott Spanbauer.
How to strip unwanted formatting from text
If you've copied text from a webpage or a PDF file to an email, you've encountered the problem associated with formatting being copied along with the text. The result can look very strange indeed, with broken lines and odd fonts.
You've probably also encountered a similar problem when you copied an email reply into another document. All those crazy >>> characters get copied, along with the broken lines and paragraphs as well.
The good news is that there are several free programs available that allow you to copy the text you want without the unwanted formatting.
One of my favorites is StripMail [1]. It's a little stand-alone program that takes the clipboard contents and converts it into plain text without formatting.
It removes HTML and Word formatting, removes email reply ">" and "|" characters and will optionally remove line feeds so that broken lines are restored into proper paragraphs. At the touch of a button the stripped text is restored to the clipboard, ready for pasting into your document.
It works like a charm. I use it daily and it's one of the most useful utilities on my PC.
The only downside of StripMail is that you have to run the program each time you want to clean some text. I overcome this by assigning a hotkey to run StripMail to automatically strip the clipboard contents ready for pasting. Removing formatting is then as simple as copying the text, hitting the hotkey and pasting.
You can create the hotkey (as I did) by using the freeware program AutoHotkey [2], but you can also do it in Windows by using a shortcut that's linked to a hotkey. Here's how:
First download the StripMail program [1]. Then use Explorer to navigate to your C:\Program files folder. In that folder create a new folder called StripMail by right mouse clicking and selecting Create/New folder. Once the folder is created, move the StripMail program stripmail.exe you downloaded into that folder.
Now open Notepad or some other plain text editor and type in the following line:
stripmail.exe -d -x
Then save the one-line file as stripmail.bat in c:\Program files\StripMail.
What we have just created is a batch file that, when run, will open StripMail, clean the contents of the clipboard and then exit the program. Now we have to create a hotkey linked to this batch file so that it runs whenever the hotkey is pressed.
While in the c:\Program files\StripMail folder, right click your mouse and select Create/New shortcut. In the wizard browse to c:\Program files\Stripmail\stripmail.bat, highlight the file and click OK. In the next screen call the shortcut StripMail. Press OK and exit the wizard.
Now right click on the shortcut icon and select Properties. Click in the Shortcut key box and then press whatever key combination you want to use as a hotkey. I use F10 but you can use whatever keys you like as long as it doesn't conflict with another keyboard shortcut combination you regularly use. Click OK and you are finished.
Now the next time you want to copy text from an email or website, just copy the text as normal, hit F10 or whatever shortcut you used, and paste. Voila, the unwanted formatting has been removed.
If all that sounds too daunting for you, try the program called PureText [3]. It's simpler to setup than StripMail, because you can create your hotkey from within the program and the same hotkey will perform an automatic paste.
On the downside, it only removes formatting and will not remove email ">>" characters or hard line breaks.
Yet another option is to use a web service. I can recommend two sites: [4] and [5]. Both are free.
Finally, here's a way you can remove unwanted formatting from text with Microsoft Word. Highlight the text and press Ctrl + Spacebar. This will automatically convert what's highlighted to plain text formatting. It won't remove those pesky email ">>" characters though. You could use Word Search and Replace but StripMail is probably a better option.
[1] http://www.dsoft.com.tr/stripmail/ (268KB)[2] http://www.autohotkey.com/
[3] http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/
[4] http://textfixer.com/tools/remove-line-breaks.php
[5] http://www.sfu.ca/~mjordan/remove-line-breaks.htm