CLCL-tool_clip

What is this?

tool_clip is not a standalone program but an extension to Mr. Tomoaki's great CLCL clipboard tool (newest release and sourcecode: https://github.com/wilfz/CLCL). Currently it contains the following features for clipboard items:

• export items and template folders to json file
• import text items and folders from json file and merge them into template folders
• export to and import from android app "Clipper"
• replace with regular expressions
• replace tabstops and/or sequences of spaces by a character string of choice
• convert tab separated data into an html table snippet, ready to insert into an email, OneNote, etc.
• macros, insert templates with expanded variables
• send menu item to clipboard
• show currently selected item in viewer
• save CLCL templates to and load from an ODBC database

To be continued ...

Installation:

• Close any active CLCL instance.
• Copy tool_clip.dll (preferably) into the CLCL folder C:\Program Files (x86)\CLCL or alternatively install with setup_too_clip.exe.

Features

Macros

The new feature of macros (insertion of template with expanded environment variables, date, time, etc.) is not as self-explaining as most other features in this plugin and needs some explanation:

Configuration:

• Start CLCL and open the options.
• Go to the Tools tab, and click the Add button.
• Add the tool_clip.dll and select the "Expand Macro" (expand_envvar) function
  
• In Command line add the name of your macro folder e.g. Macros.
  
• If you want to access your macros easily, you can set a hotkey, e.g. Alt-M.
• You can also add the Macro tool to any menu of your choice in the Action tab.
  
• Open CLCL viewer and select the Template node.
• Add a folder in the first tier below the Template node with the name from above, e.g. Macros.
  It is essential, that the folder bears the exact name (case-sensitive) as specified in command line of the tool and is located directly in Templates and not in any subfolder.
  
• Now you are ready to create your macros as items with Unicode format in that folder.
• Text macros can contain any environment variable, enclosed in percent symbols, e.g. %USERNAME%, %COMPUTERNAME% etc.
  
• %DATE%, and %TIME% will be expanded according to your locale settings, but format can be specified explicitly behind a colon, but within the percent brackets.
  Format must conform to Microsoft's date specification and time specification, e.g. %DATE:dddd, d MMMM, yyyy% or %TIME:hh:mm:ss%

Usage:

• While editing text, invoke the Tools popup menu, and choose Expand Macro.
  A new popup menu will appear that contains the items of your Macros folder.
  
• Choose a macro, and it will immediately be expanded and inserted at your current text cursor position.
  
• If you configured a hotkey, e.g. Alt-M you can use that as a shortcut to the Macros popup menu.
• If your macro contains %CLIPBOARD% this will be expanded to the content of your clipboard prior to invocation of the popup menu. But attention: Even if you cancel the action without choosing from the popup, your clipboard content will be altered!
• If you invoke CLCL menu or a CLCL hotkey to insert an item directly from templates or history, only the macro variables %DATE:{format}%, %TIME:{format}% and %CLIPBOARD% within the item are always expanded before pasting, no matter whether the item is located in the "Macros" folder or anywhere else in templates or history.
  To have this immediate expansion for ordinary environment variables as well, set expand_all=1 in section [Macros] of configuration file tool_clip.ini:
  
  The drawback however is, that so it is not possible anymore to insert environment variables literally (without expanding) from templates.
  You can avoid this "immediate expansion" completely, even for the special macro variables mentioned above, just uncheck "When data is sent to clipboard" in the tool's configuration.

Update history

• Ver 1.0.2.0 -> 1.0.3.0
  • Features:
    • Macros, expansion of variables in templates
    • preserve regex expression from the previous call
• Ver 1.0.1.0 -> Ver 1.0.2.0
  • Features:
    • new function "Show in Viewer"
  • Bugfix:
    • show MessageBox on error in Replace with regular expression
• Ver 1.0.0.4 -> Ver 1.0.1.0
  • Features:
    • replace with regular expressions
    • export to and import from android app "Clipper"
  • Bugfix:
    • export only TEXT and UNICODE_TEXT items to json file
    • in json-import replace empty title with (beginning of) text content