Ditto

Copying and pasting are fundamental essentials of computing, but have you ever hit Ctrl+C to copy an item and then accidentally hit Ctrl+C again on some other item and overwritten the original item thus having to go back and recopy it? Who hasn't. Ever had several items to copy from one location to another and had to swap back and forth between applications copying and pasting each one at a time? Again, this is probably familiar to all of us.

Well, the lightweight and highly configurable little app named Ditto provides easy solutions to all these problems along with a wealth of other features that, together, make the Windows Clipboard a relic of the ancient past. In short, if there's a certain capability or capabilities that you've always wished the Windows Clipboard had, Ditto probably does it.

At the core of the application is the ability paste up to ten of the last copies via hotkey. For example, let's say you want to cherry-pick ten isolated sentences out of a large body of text and paste them into a new document. You simply copy each sentence one after another (via Ctrl+C, right-click context menu, etc. just as before) and then swap to your new document and paste each sentence with rapid fire using the hotkeys. That saves you from ten instances of having to copy, swap to new document, paste, swap back to source document, over and over again.

Additionally, triggering Ditto's main hotkey brings up a clipboard window that shows customizable previews of all recent copies and allows pasting simply by arrowing to the copy you want to paste and hitting enter to paste it (or scroll with the mouse and double click to do the same). Not only does this make a great alternative to using the hotkeys to copy and paste batches of data without lots of task swapping, the Ditto clipboard window is also extremely handy if you copied something important in the past -- be it minutes, hours or even days previous (the depth of Ditto's "memory" is customizable in options) -- and wherever you pasted it to is now lost, damaged or otherwise inaccessible, you can just dig into Ditto's clipboard and retrieve it.

Once you get "under the hood" with Ditto you will find that it's highly configurable on top of it's already very useful core features. Key examples include the ability to customize hotkeys (including Win key support) and the ability to define exactly what Ditto handles and how long it keeps track of it. Specifically, you can define how long Ditto retains copies on it's clipboard, the maximum amount of copies to retain, the maximum size of copies to be handled, and what sort of copied data is to be handled (text, rich text, graphics, sound, etc.). Anything not handled by Ditto is simply handled by the Windows Clipboard in the traditional copy/paste manner instead of being added to the queue of contents in Ditto's Clipboard. This is particularly useful for people who copy/paste data that is relatively large in size, e.g. working with high res photography in Photoshop where a single copy/paste may be several megabytes in size. (Ditto can handle this data if you want it to, but you'll find that the database it stores its clipboard in will become extremely bloated the more you dump massive copies into it and it will eventually slow down Ditto's overall responsiveness on an average computer.)

Furthermore, the clipboard is even networkable with other clipboards which can be invaluable in, say, office environments where pooling data is crucial. However, this feature as well as the fact that Ditto can "remember" so much of your data -- perhaps very private data -- may be alarming to some users. Fear not, everything mentioned here (and more) isn't just configurable, it can be completely turned off as well for those who have privacy concerns.

I use Ditto at work, but only because it's the only clipboard manager they let me use, as I can't install whatever I want on my work computer.

And my goodness, the UX is awful.

I can't see how to simply order the clips newest oldest. I'd like to be able to single-click an entry to put it on the clipboard, but no.

I also don't want it to do anything when I double-click a clip other than put it on the clipboard. But no; Ditto also sends its window to the bottom, and brings some other -- random! -- window to the top. Yes, random. Not the last window I was using, random. It's infuriating when I'm trying to work.

There's an option to set the Ditto window always-on-top, but that's no easy solution, since the Ditto window cannot be minimized. As I said, awful UX.

ClipCache Pro is so much better. I hate using Ditto so much I often simply ignore it and use a Run box or Notepad instead. Ditto's rating is based on its price alone.