Don’t get irate, get ClipMate
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in support, Software, Applications on
The next time you get some piddling small change to make what’s actually going to take you hours, put up your blood pressure and make no difference at all but you have to do it to comply with some idiot directive like ‘all the images in the CMS must have file names with Separate Words Starting In Upper Case’, you could start writing scripts with complex regular expressions - which is a little easier in Windows 7 because you get PowerShell and a simple little script IDE. Or - especially if you’re doing it on behalf of a user - you could turn to a tool that’s saved me hours of time over the years I’ve been using it: ClipMate from Thornsoft.
As the name suggests, it was originally designed to make the Windows clipboard more useful. You know how you see something interesting, like a URL or the instructions for fooling Windows 7 beta into upgrading to Windows 7 RC and you copy it, only to get distracted and copy something else before you get around to pasting the first clip anywhere…
Personally, I think that’s one of the main reasons that the Web page you’re most likely to open is the one you’ve just closed, but ClipMate saves everything you copy into a rolling list (mine goes back to May 30th). If there are things you paste a lot (frequent flyer numbers, your address, directions to your house that stop people taking what looks like a short cut, basic instructions for internal applications that don’t work the way users expect, a scan of your signature for pasting into that one fax a year you still have to send…) you can put those into a ’safe’ collection that doesn’t get cleaned out automatically and you can have multiple collections to keep handy scripts separate from Polite Responses To Stupid Requests.
But once you have something copied, ClipMate also has a bundle of tools for working with it. You get a word and character count at the bottom of the window, or the dimensions if it’s an image. You can see spelling mistakes (and correct them before you paste the text back). You can remove line breaks - ideal for fixing URLs that break apart in email. You can strip out fancy text formatting (very handy if you like to compose your blog posts in a real word processor and paste them in to the blog editor without worrying about getting weird fonts and weirder HTML codes in there). You can show non-printing characters like tabs and spaces to see why text doesn’t lay out the way you expect. Or you can just highlight HTML formatting and URLs in the clip, to make it easier to read. You can strip out any formatting - the >> quote marks on email inclusions or any other specific character that’s in your way (the icon for this is a magician’s top hat and wand). You can add macros and regular expressions to clips that activate when you paste them (ideal for scripts). And you can swap the case of the clip - not just by clicking an icon or a menu entry, but with a keyboard shortcut.
So you can iterate through your list of image names going click (select filename), click (rename file), Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Alt-C (open ClipMate), Ctrl-Alt-M (Change To Leading Caps), click (select filename that’s still live for renaming), Ctrl-V. It’s the kind of soothing repetition that you can speed through even while you fume about whoever decided Leading Cap Image File Names were a good idea in the first place.
ClipMate: it’s just so useful.
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