Macro or Clip Manager?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4866

Posted by srdiamond15
2006-01-01 17:20:04

Jack,

It sounds like what you are looking for is more limited than a macro program, unless you want to do things with it besides the mentioned. Essentially, you seem to be looking for an autotext application, one that will substitute text for a hotkey. Probably a clip manager would suit your stated purpose better than a macro application. Because of its limited function, it could be less resource-hungry. And it would also allow you to organize your information in a hierarchy.

A fairly inexpensive one that’s very good is ClipCache (http://www.xrayz.co.uk/clipcache/?page=default) I would go with version 3, which is in beta, but can be downloaded. You have to get a free registration number from the developer.

I think there are problems you might encounter with a hotkey solution to this problem. Most obviously, you have to remember the hot key. More seriously, there will likely be conflicts with hotkeys assigned functions in other applications that you may be using concurrently.

With ClipCache and ClipMate coming out with new versions, there may seem little need now to look at obscure clip managers, but here’s one I’ve discovered that seems to me to work more rationally than the others: Parallaxis WinClip (http://www.parallaxis.com), which allows you to make choices in a hierarchical fashion, somewhat in the manner of the Windows menu system in its use of the alt key. (A launcher I’ve mentioned here that uses this kind of paradigm was Active Launch, which is now sadly defunct.) The only caveat about WinClip is that on my system, it has tended to produce excessive cpu cycles, sometimes triggering other programs to do this. I take it that this is a kind of bug. It isn’t a question of excessive resource use, because the use isn’t part of its functioning, and it can function well when it is behaving itself.

I have started trying WinClip, using a new freeware application called ProcessTamer. Pretty cool, actually. To me the tendency for processes sometimes to take over the computer is the most irritating Windows characteristic, and it’s about time someone designed an program to deal with it. But unless you are experiencing other problems with over-cycling, this may be too convoluted a solution for most people, if they experience this problem with WinClip. (The developer has hired a firm to provide tech support, I think, and it wasn’t very helpful with the cpu cycle problem.)

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