Request: stack (push/pop) based copy & paste

(7 posts) (4 voices)

Started 3 years ago by jumpfroggy
Latest reply from jumpfroggy
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jumpfroggy
Member

I've thought about this for a while, and I think it'd be really nifty to have. It'd be great if PN had options for more complicated copy/cut/paste mechanisms. Right now we have normal copy/cut/paste, and we also have "Clipboard Swap".

It'd be cool to have something like a stack-based clipboard, so you could copy many things into it, then paste many things out of it. So you'd stack-copy #1 to the clipboard, then stack-copy #2, then stack-copy #3. So you'd have a clipboard that had #1, #2, and #3 inside. Then when you hit stack-paste, it spits out the last thing that you copied (#3). Hitting stack-paste 2 more times would spit out #2 and #1 in that order.

You could also have a queue based clipboard, which would paste things out in the order they were copied in. So it'd be like this:
queue-copy #1, queue-copy #2, queue-copy #3
queue-paste #1, queue-paste #2, queue-paste #3

These would be really helpful when you're copying & pasting many elements within a page. I think they'd have to be completely separate systems from the normal copy & paste, to avoid confusion, and they'd have to have different shortcuts as well (maybe none by default, unless there are some free like control+shift+x/c/v, etc).

The one other tweak I'd make is to have some kind of visual feedback to see what you had in the clipboard. So when you stack-copy two things, you'd see a small window popup that would show you snippets of each, before disappearing (like an email notification popup). It wouldn't help if you try to keep lots of stuff in there for a long time (which would be risky and confusing), but it would help when you're just quickly copying & pasting items within a page.

I know this would be an advanced feature, but it would be really nice to have. Thanks!

(I can't make a bug/feature request right now, google's bug site is down for maintenance)

Posted 3 years ago #
Nux
Member

Personally I use:
Copy / Paste near next to copy / Copy / CTRL Z...
Which gives pretty much the same results (not that you can shuffle order of copied elements). And so I believe it would be better to have a clipboard that remembers e.g. 10 last copies which you could choose in drop down menu (e.g. RMB, Clipboard, choose one that starts with...).

Posted 3 years ago #
jumpfroggy
Member

Nux, I like that idea too. The problem is that I want to be able to copy & paste quickly, especially if I'm doing many things in a row. A clipboard with a dropdown isn't great if it has to be used with the mouse, so good keyboard access might make that design doable. I think there's tons of different clipboard mechanisms that would help out in different cases. I think your suggestion would be more generally helpful in most cases, since mine is more specific.

So in your suggestion, I would think that copy/cut/paste would work normally. But if you hit a special paste command, it would open a dropdown of the last 10 copied/cut clipboard items to choose from. Not bad, I could definitely use that.

Posted 3 years ago #
simon
PN Developer

If you were happy to use a different keyboard extension, at least for now, then you could definitely write this using an extension or even a PyPN script.

Posted 3 years ago #

NickDMax
Member

Here it is. A clipboard stack. Note that this ONLY works in PN. Well that is that the stack-like feature only works in PN. This does actually use the clipboard so that when you copy something you can then paste it into another application -- BUT that will not pop an item off of the stack. Likewise should you copy something in another application (or using PN's default Copy) it does NOT get pushed onto the stack.

I wanted to have a function that would push the current clipboard onto the stack, but scintilla does not offer a way to get the text from the clipboard directly. I suppose that I could have pasted it and then copied it again but this seemed to be messy and would probably be buggy.

So here it is:

###############################################################################
## ClipStack.py -- A clipboard stack allowing you to copy items into a stack
## and then paste them back in a FILO way. So the first item copied to the stack
## is the last item pasted from it.
##  Copy item #1, Copy item #2, Copy item #3
##  Paste #3, #2, #1
##
## The last item copied is placed onto the regular OS clipboard
## The last item pasted is ALSO placed into the regular OS clipboard
##    So take care not to confuse this with the regular OS clipboard and
##    The standard Copy/Paste operations.
## By: NickDMax

import pn
import scintilla
from pypn.decorators import script

class PNClipStack:
    """ Maintains a stack of text to paste  """
    def __init__(self):
        """ initialize inner data:
            stack -- the internal list used to store clipboard items """
        self.stack = []

    def push(self, text):
        self.stack.append(text)

    def pop(self):
        retValue = ''
        if len(self.stack) > 0:
            retValue = self.stack.pop()
        return retValue

    def clear(self):
        self.stack = []

    def getSize(self):
        return len(self.stack)

ClipStack = PNClipStack()

@script('Stack Count', 'ClipStack')
def clstkCount():
    """ Prints out the size of the current ClipStack """
    pn.AddOutput('ClipStack Size: ' + str(ClipStack.getSize()) + '\n')

@script('Copy', 'ClipStack')
def clstkCopy():
    """ Adds the current selection to the ClipStack """
    doc = pn.CurrentDoc()
    if doc is not None:     #Lets try not to crash pn too often...
        editor = scintilla.Scintilla(pn.CurrentDoc())
        start = editor.SelectionStart
        end = editor.SelectionEnd
        if (start == end):  #nothing is selected lets try to grab the current word.
            start = editor.WordStartPosition(start, True)
            end = editor.WordEndPosition(end, True)
        text = None
        if (start != end):
            text = editor.GetTextRange(start, end)
        if text is not None:
            ClipStack.push(text)
            editor.CopyText(len(text), text)
            #clstkCount()
    pass

@script('Paste', 'ClipStack')
def clstkPaste():
    """ Pastes the top item from the ClipStack into the document """
    doc = pn.CurrentDoc()
    if doc is not None:     #Lets try not to crash pn too often...
        editor = scintilla.Scintilla(pn.CurrentDoc())
        text = ClipStack.pop()
        editor.CopyText(len(text), text)
        editor.Paste()
        #clstkCount()

@script('Clear', 'ClipStack')
def clstkCear():
    """ Clears the current ClipStack """
    ClipStack.clear()
    #clstkCount()

Enjoy :) Its actually a pretty neat feature.

If you want to use key bindings I suggest NOT overriding the current ones as these will still come in handy.

Posted 3 years ago #

NickDMax
Member

I added a cut routine as well to sort of round out the suit. The full snippet can be found on the PyPN code wiki..

Here is the update:

@script('Cut', 'ClipStack')
def clstkCut():
    """ Adds the current selection to the ClipStack -- cuts it from document"""
    doc = pn.CurrentDoc()
    if doc is not None:     #Lets try not to crash our script
        editor = scintilla.Scintilla(pn.CurrentDoc())
        start = editor.SelectionStart
        end = editor.SelectionEnd
        if (start == end):  #nothing is selected lets try to grab the current word.
            start = editor.WordStartPosition(start, True)
            end = editor.WordEndPosition(end, True)
        text = None
        if (start != end):
            text = editor.GetTextRange(start, end)
        if text is not None:
            ClipStack.push(text)
            editor.SetSel(start, end)
            editor.Cut()
            #clstkCount()

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Request: stack (push/pop) based copy & paste

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