Plain Clip FAQ
Below you will find answers to some of the more frequently asked questions on Plain Clip.
When I launch Plain Clip, nothing happens.
This may sound odd, but this is the way it is supposed to be. As Plain Clip does nothing more than modify the clipboard’s contents, there simply is no need for a graphical user interface. Hence, when you doubleclick Plain Clip, it will start, do its job and quit—and during this short time, you will not even see its icon in the dock.
In other words: You will only notice that Plain Clip has done its work by comparing the clipboard contents before and afterwards.
I launched Plain Clip, then copied and pasted text, but it is still formatted.
Plain Clip is not a daemon that runs silently in the background, waiting for formatted text to be put on the clipboard. In fact, it's much simpler: it will only process the clipboard's content when it is launched and it will quit immediately afterwards. So, usually it is a matter of copy → launch Plain Clip → paste. If that seems awkward to you, I strongly recommend using it with a hotkey utility (see next answer).
Implementing Plain Clip as a daemon which automatically cleans the clipboard appears to be a much more elegant solution, but would have two major drawbacks:
- It would be impossible to paste text with formatting, for instance, when you move text around within a Pages or OpenOffice.org text document.
- You could not use different types of cleaning. Plain Clip offers some cleaning options, which can be used independently when used with a hotkey utility (see ReadMe). This would not be possible with a daemon.
I would like to launch Plain Clip using a keyboard shortcut, but do not use a hotkey utility.
To be able to respond to keyboard shortcuts even when it is not running, Plain Clip would require an invisible process permanently running in the background. As this is exactly what shortcut / hot-key managers such as Spark offer, to me it would seem counterproductive to replicate such functionality in Plain Clip. Accordingly, I do not plan to add support for global keyboard shortcuts.