Log clipboard

[Ketil Wendelbo Aanensen]

There is a lot of information stored in various clipboard managers, and it would be great to keep that between sessions, days and whatnot. For the power user crowd, using the clipboard more or less reflects your whole workflow, so it would be nice to have GZG track that too.

I'm personally using Parcelite, to have a longer history than default. There is also Glipper.
My point being, we could make a feature to log clipboard history.

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

The biggest problem with this is that it requires active polling of the X server. There's no way to receive an async event when the clipboard has changed. Polling the clipboard every 0.5s or so can be a very bad idea for battery lifetime.

All of the above also applies to all apps like Glipper, Klipper, Parcelite, and what have we.

[Ketil Wendelbo Aanensen (ketilwaa-deactivatedaccount)]

Thanks for your technical input Mikkel! Your points are very valid.

Would it be technically possible to have the clipboard managers support sending dbus information when they add something to the clipboard? Maybe some of them would be willing to extend their applications to work better with Zeitgeist. It's worth a try if it is technically possible.

[Natan Yellin (aantny)]

Ketil:
Personally, I wouldn't want my entire clipboard history stored, because there's a lot of "spam" in there which I'm never going to look back on. (For example, I usually copy and paste lines of code and email addresses which I never need later on.) For me, storing the entire history would just make it impossible to find what I'm really looking for.

There are two good solutions I think:
1. Add an "Add Clipboard's Contents to Zeitgeist" button to Zeitgeist. (I have an unpublished version of my Smart Feeds mockup [1] which has a button like this to add the clipboard's content to a feed.)

2. For users who have a clipboard manager already installed, your idea about working with the clipboard manager makes a lot of sense. The clipboard manager should offer the user the following options:
A. Contents from the clipboard are automatically added to Zeitgeist over dbus. (For users who really do want their entire clipboard history stored in Zeitgeist.)
B. The clipboard manager displays a "Star" or "Bookmark" icon by each item and if the user clicks on the icon then the item will be saved to Zeitgeist. (For users like me.)

[1] See http://natanyellin.com/2009/06/14/zeitgeist-mockup/ for the original mockup

[Ketil Wendelbo Aanensen (ketilwaa-deactivatedaccount)]

Natan, I see your point, so how about this:
You have the option to log nothing from the clipboard, all copied things, or just the pasted stuff.
Is there a way of getting that type of info?

[Ketil Wendelbo Aanensen (ketilwaa-deactivatedaccount)]

Followup: Is there a way of getting that info through some not-yet-implemented dbus magic from a clipboard manager?

[Natan Yellin (aantny)]

I'm not sure. If I had to guess, I'd say that the clipboard managers probably don't keep track of which items get pasted (they may not even have a good way of keeping track of that), but I could be wrong.

I'm definitely planning to support adding items from the clipboard to a smart feed manually (by clicking an "Add from Clipboard Button" or by using some keyboard shortcut) and if someone wants to add the necessary code to one of the clipboard managers then we could even include a default "Smart Feed" for the clipboard. Whether the smart feed would contain all items from the clipboard or only the pasted stuff depends on the clipboard manager.

[Seif Lotfy (seif)]

This should be done as a dataprovider as in external application and has nothing ot do wiht the engine