Supercharge QAP with the free Quick Clipboard Editor

Change Clipboard character case

To add a Clipboard Command to your QAP menu:

• open the Customize window and click Add and select the favorite type Clipboard Command;
• in the commands tree view list, select the command, for example, UPPER CASE, click Add and save your changes as you would do with any other favorites;
• now copy some text in the Clipboard, select the UPPER CASE command in your QAP menu;
• finally, paste the Clipboard to see that its content has been converted to upper case.

The Change Case commands are described in the Quick Clipboard Editor help page.

Note: QCE can only modify the contents of the clipboard to plain text. If the clipboard contains multi-format content (such as formatted text copied into Word or cells in Excel), this content will be converted to plain text before being transformed by the QCE command.

Encoding and decoding the Clipboard content

At the bottom of the Clipboard commands list, you can see various encoding and decoding commands. For example, to convert an encoded URL parameter like

some%20text%20with%20text%20between%20%22double%20quotes%22%20or%20%28parenthesis%29

to normal text:

some text with text between "double quotes" or (parenthesis)

• add the Decode from URL encoding (URI) and save your menu;
• now copy an encoded URL parameter to the Clipboard, select the Decode from URL encoding (URI) command in your QAP menu;
• and paste the Clipboard to see that the parameter has been converted to normal text.

The various encoding and decoding commands are described in the Quick Clipboard Editor documentation.

Automatically copy the selected text and paste back the modified Clipboard

In the Add/Edit Favorite dialog box, see in the Advanced Settings tab the checkboxes allowing to:

• Copy to the Clipboard the text selected in the active window before executing the Clipboard command activated in the QAP menu;
  • you can set the maximum number of seconds to wait for content to be copied; if the copy command fails the Clipboard command is aborted;
• Paste the text modified by the Clipboard command to the active window after executing the Clipboard command;
  • if you enable both the Copy and Paste checkboxes, the select text will be automatically replaced with the converted text;
  • however, unfortunately, some applications (for example Notepad++ in my case) don’t handle correctly the paste action (you will have to experiment);
  • also, at this time, to increase the chances of success, some delays are voluntarily inserted during these actions; this is why it can take one or two seconds to see the replaced content;
• Finally, as for most othe favorite types, you can play a sound after the Clipboard command execution.

Add powerful QCE commands to your menu

What you’ve seen up to this point is only the tip of what can executed with the new QAP Clipboard Commands. As you can see in the list of commands, you can transform the Clipboard content with commands like:

• insert a string of characters at the start, at the end or at a specific position on every line of the Clipboard content;
• remove some text on every line based on a extensive list of criteria;
• filter lines or filter characters based on various criteria (including regular expressions);
• find and replace text;
• reformat paragraphs with configurable line length;
• sort the Clipboard content with lots of options;
• etc.

If you try to select one of these commands when Quick Clipboard Editor is not already running, QAP will prompt you to launch QCE. If you don’t have it, download and install Quick Clipboard Editor and launch it.

In addition to Clipboard transformation commands, you can use your QAP menu to paste Pinned clips saved in QCE. These Pinned clips can contain plain text, bitmap images or multi-format clips like those copied from MS Office applications containing text, HTML, RTF, image, etc. When added to your QAP menu, these clips can be pasted at the cursor location into any application as if you would do by hitting Ctrl+V.

Note: After adding a QCE Pinned clip to your QAP menu, be careful not to move the Pinned clip to a new number in QCE. If you need to do so, you will need to update your QAP favorite with the new Pinned clip number.

How QAP and QCE work together

Quick Access Popup v12 comes with a new companion executable named QuickClipboardEditor-ReceiverLite.exe. This executable is launched automatically with QAP and is ready in the background to execute commands sent by QAP using the Windows messaging system. This receiver “lite” can execute Quick Clipboard Editor commands that don’t require configuration. This is why these commands (Change Case, Encode/Decode) are considered “built-in” QAP.

This is different if you install and launch QCE (v3.0.9.9 or more recent). Then, QAP will detect that QCE is available to execute Clipboard transformation commands configured and saved by the user in QCE. In this case, the messages sent by QAP are executed by the executable named QuickClipboardEditor-Receiver.exe launched with QCE.

For more information

You will find more information about Quick Clipboard Editor in the QCE documentation. You can also find help or ask questions about QCE in the QCE Support forum. For questions or help about launching QCE commands from QAP, please go to the QAP Support forum.