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Has Anyone Used The TextBEAST Clipboard Manager?
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Posted by Gary Carson
Aug 26, 2011 at 04:20 PM
Noticed this is on sale at Bits DuJour today. I’ve never heard of the app before, but it looks like it might be useful.
Has anyone used it?
Posted by Cassius
Aug 26, 2011 at 05:08 PM
Try ClipX (or Clip-X). I think it’s free. I’ve been very happy with it.
-c
Gary Carson wrote:
>Noticed this is on sale at Bits DuJour today. I’ve never heard of the app before, but it
>looks like it might be useful.
>
>Has anyone used it?
Posted by Gary Carson
Aug 27, 2011 at 01:28 AM
textBEAST looks good and a lot of people would probably find it useful, but I don’t like the fact that you have to open the application and select where you want your clipped text to go before you copy it. I might be wrong about the way it works since I haven’t read through all the documentation, but the ergonomics seems pretty awkward.
CintaNotes is the best personal notes manager of this kind I’ve ever found. You can copy text directly to a note in CintaNotes without ever opening the program. It just has to be running in the system tray. Highlight the text you want to copy, then CTL-F12 and you’re done. That’s all there is to it. And if you want to write a note yourself, a hot key will open the note editor. You never have to take your hands off the keyboard.
I hope Alex (?) keeps developing CintaNotes. It’s the most ergonomic program I’ve used in a long time. I’d definitely be willing to pay for a license in the future.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 28, 2011 at 01:02 PM
Gary Carson wrote:
>CintaNotes is the best personal notes manager of this kind I’ve ever
>found. You can copy text directly to a note in CintaNotes without ever opening the
>program. It just has to be running in the system tray. Highlight the text you want to
>copy, then CTL-F12 and you’re done. That’s all there is to it. And if you want to write a
>note yourself, a hot key will open the note editor. You never have to take your hands off
>the keyboard.
The idea of a ready-and-waiting inbox sounds very interesting, but I can see a certain conflict with my current setup: Ctrl-F12 is used in Surfulater to create a new folder, and cannot be re-assigned. Is it possible to change the hotkey in CintaNotes?
An issue I have with these wonderful tools for collecting information is that they don’t always make it easy to get that information out, selectively, to other programs for further processing—by ‘easy’ I mean without going into a whole export routine just to output a few entries, and ideally not having to do it one by one. In this respect I wonder whether a clip manager like ClipCache, mentiond by JohnK here http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/9997 would be a preferable solution.
Is it possible in CintaNotes to select, say, 4-5 consecutive (or not) entries and copy them to another program with a couple of clicks/keystrokes?
Posted by Gary Carson
Aug 28, 2011 at 03:45 PM
I was wrong about having to open textBEAST first before you can copy anything. Should have read the documentation more thoroughly.
textBEAST is a really nice app. It has its own clipboard so everything you copy with CTL-C or CTL-X in any other program ends up in the textBEAST clipboard automatically. You can open the clipboard later and move (with a double pane view) each copied item into one of ten different “libraries” which act like folders. I’m still going through everything, but it looks like each “library” has nine “pages,” each of which can hold 20 copied items, so each library or folder can hold 180 items and the whole clipboard manager can save 1800 items.
I haven’t gone through everything yet, but it looks like there are keyboard shortcuts for all the basic operations. The more I use textBEAST, the more I like it. Haven’t run into any bugs so far. It seems pretty solid.
textBEAST has one minor feature that I like a lot. When you move your mouse over a saved item, you get a popup balloon explaining the keyboard shortcuts you can use. Another thing I like about the program is the fact that it runs in the background (like CintaNotes) so you never have to actually open the application to save text. The copy operations are all invisible.
Overall, this is a fantastic little productivity application. I copy a lot of text snippets—excerpts from manuscripts, research articles, news stories, etc., etc.—and now I don’t have to worry about pasting those snippets into OneNote or Word or whatever right after I’ve copied them to the clipboard. I can go through them later in textBEAST and decide what to do with them.