Clipboard history idea.

[Matthew Newhall <odinson flatclub ml org>]

Hello

    I have an idea and I am not sure I will have the time to implement
it (or the ability??).  How about having a clipboard history?   A cut
and copy history of sorts.  Would it be a prohibitive amount of work to
save a user defined number of items per session of each data type?

    Now that I have your attention (or I don't) I'll go into more
detail.  I was helping my girlfriend with her Visual Basic
homework (shiver..) and her textbook had a typo.  The textbook told her
to copy (using the edit menu) a first image, then a second, one right
after another to her current project.  When she went to paste the image
to her project she was irate to find that the first image she had copied
was gone.  After a little thought I realized this type of clipboard
behavior seemed unnecessarily simplistic, hence the idea of the
clipboard history.

    The idea is simple enough, there could be a simple daemon that could
run in the background.  It should not have to run by default, to save
memory for those who don't have it spare.  Let's call it gcb for
arguments sake.  Whenever any data is is cut or copied to the clipboard
a signal would be sent to the gcb (if it is running.)  I imagine that
there would need to be a small hack in (ORBit??) to send this signal to
a running copy of gcb.  Gcb would then send a request for the cut or
copied data.  It would store it in an array of user defined size, of
items of the same data type.  It would continue to store appropriate
data in each data array type until the memory or item limit was
reached.  If a certain data types limit is reached then gcb would bump
items of that data type's array based on need, in a FIFO (first in first
out) basis.

    Of course you would need a viewer/picker application as well.   Lets
call this gclipboard.  Ideally gclipboard could be run as applet or a
window.  It would act as a front end for gcb.  On the configuration end,
the user could allocate different limits on memory for different data
types.  This should be flexible as one user might want to 2 kb of text
and another 20 megs of .xpm files.  The user could also choose to
activate or deactivate the array for a data type altogether.  All a user
has to to regain access to an image he/she/it saved several cuts or
copies ago is start up gclipboard and scroll to and click on a thumbnail
of the desired picture in the "images" row.  Gclipboard will now tell
gcb to send a paste signal to (ORBit??) with the data of the clicked
image to replace the current clipboard occupant.  This should be
recorded in the "images" history as well.

    Unfortunately as useful as this thing might be I am in, what will
probably prove to be my worst semester in my CS BS.  On top of that I am
currently the president of a LUG which also consumes some time.  I think
it's more important that somebody does this, instead on me just sitting
on it until this winter break.  I may take a stab at it then, but who
knows how far along Gnome will be at that point.   Thank you for
listening.  I hope I have inspired someone for a quick and useful hack.

        Matthew Newhall
        President of FLAT
        http://flatclub.ml.org/
        nneewwhhaallll@mindspring.com
        odinson@flatclub.ml.org
        http://flatclub.ml.org/~odinson/

PS: Gnome .3 is great!