New In ClipTools: Smart Files and Repeat Paste

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Clip Tools version 1.3 is out. Let me show you some of the new features. 

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So Clip Tools is my free Clipboard Manager that you can get in the Mac App Store. Version 1.3 just came out and there are some new features I want to show you. 

Now the first new feature I want to show you is called the Smart Files. Now Clip Tools has already had for awhile something called Smart Clips. You can put anything you want in Smart Clips. You can just put some regular text in there that's kind of permanently saved and you can easily insert it in text. But you can also include little functions in there, like doing calculations or asking for prompts, and then have that incorporated into the clip. So this isn't new. 

What is new is Smart Files which is the next submenu down. Smart Files are just like Smart Clips and they work exactly the same way except you don't create them inside of Clip Tools. Instead you create little text files and you put them in a folder, any folder you want, on the Mac's hard drive and then you'll see them listed here and be able to access them. That way you can easily edit these Smart Clips as text files in an app, like say TextEdit, rather than editing them in Clip Tools. 

So, for instance let's go and create a folder to hold our Smart Files. In my Documents folder I'm going to create a new folder and I'm just going to call this Smart Files. You can call it anything you want. In here I'm going to put a Smart File. Now I'm going to use TextEdit to create it. It's the easiest app to use. I'm going to create a new document and I'm going to make sure it is a text document. There are no features here at the top if it's not. If it is Rich Text you can switch right here using this command so it is already plain text. Now I could put whatever I want in here. So let me put some text like this. So this is just plain text. It is not doing anything smart. But it is still very useful if you want to have this file and be able to edit it and change it and all of that and then use it inside of Clip Tools. 

I'm going to Save this and I'm going to save it to the Smart Files folder here. I'm going to give it a name. The name is important because this is how you'll see it in Clip Tools. So I'll put something like Get Back To You for this and I'll save it. Now, if I were to close this file here let's open up another TextEdit file so we can have something that we can paste into. I'm going to go to Clip Tools. What I need to do in Smart Files is choose a Smart File's folder since I haven't done that yet. So I'm going to select this and I'm going to go into Documents and I'm going to look for that folder there and Open. Now if I look at Smart Files here, first I see a list of all the text files, and they have to be .txt files, I see them all here. I also have the ability to update the Smart Files Menu. That's important. Whenever you make a change, add a file or remove a file or change a file or rename a file, you want to do this so this menu can be updated. You could also jump to your Smart Files folders. So if you forget where it is located you can jump there and then you can work with those files or you can change it if you want to switch to another folder. 

But you've also got the list of all the files here, in this case this one, and if I use it you can see it uses it just like pasting any other clip in. So now I can fill this folder here with all these text files and use them inside of Clip Tools to paste things in. Better still I can create ones that are actually Smart Clips. So they can use all those different functions. For instance, let's do this: so here is a Smart Clip here. It's going to prompt twice and I'm going to Save this into Smart Files and I'm going to call this Order. Now if I go into Smart Files and Smart Clips you can see it is not there yet. I have to update this Smart Files Menu. Now when I go back you can see they are both there. So I can select Order and it is going to prompt me, just like the Smart Clip is asking. I'll save that and I'll type that and you can see how it pasted this in like that. So it is just like Smart Clips. No real new functionality there. It is just that now I've got this easy set of files that I can work with and I can change what's in them. You don't have to update the menu if you just change what is inside the file. Only if you add files, remove files, or rename them do you need to actually update the menu using this right here. 

Now the next thing I want to show you is this thing called Repeat Paste. So what this does is it takes the last thing you pasted using Clip Tools, not using just Command V but using Clip Tools specifically, and it will paste that thing again. So, for instance, let's say you do a calculation. So I'll go in here and use Clip Tools, say Paste Calculation, and I do a complex calculation, 7 times 4 plus 6 minus 3 and I can go on and on. Let's say I paste this in and I get that answer, 67. But let's say I realize, Oh, that's great but I also need that somewhere else. Well, I'm not going to do the whole calculation again. So my only other option would be to select this, Copy it so it is in the Clipboard, and Paste it. But I can now use Repeat Paste to do that instead. Repeat Paste will look and see that the last thing that Clip Tools pasted was the answer to that calculation and it will give you that again.

Here's another example. This is the one that actually inspired the function. Let's say I want to paste something into social media. I want to paste the title of this page, the link to it, and the description. Three different things. Well, Clip Tools has a handy function to be able to do that. I can Copy the title here and then I can go and Copy the URL and then I can go and Copy the description. When I look in Clip Tools now I can see the last three things are the title, the URL, and the description. Now let's say I go to a social media and I want to paste all of that in. I can do it one at a time. I can also hold the Shift key down and this will group paste. So if I selected the third item here it is going to paste the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st items like this. You can see that's a great paste into a social media post. I've got my title, I've got the URL, and I've got the description. 

But let's say I want to do that again. Well, I can go here to Clip Tools again and do the same thing. But, with Repeat Paste I can just repeat what I just pasted in. You can see it will paste those three lines in even though that wasn't something I copied before. Of course I can do that with just keyboard shortcuts. If I note that I go into Settings here and that I'm using Shift Command M as the activate menu global keyboard shortcut. So now I can do Shift Command M and then Repeat Paste is Shift Command V. So I can easily paste something in again. If I need to paste this in ten different places I can do it very easily after I paste it the first time. 

Remember that Smart File we created. Well, if I go back and use that Smart File again and it is going to be an order of ten and it's going to ship on Saturday and I paste that in and then realize, Oh I need to paste that in somewhere else as well, I can do Shift Command M and then the Repeat Paste is Shift Command V. You can see it pastes in the last thing that was pasted by Clip Tools. 

So there is one more I want to show you. That's a new function in Smart Clips and now, of course, Smart Files as well. Let's go to MacMost.com/Clip Tools where you find all the information about how to use all the different functions in Clip Tools. If I go to the Smart Clips Section here I can see this new Command. It's Reuse. The idea here is you can use something, like an ask or a pick that as you choose different items or even the random function, something that normally would use once and it would be hard to actually use it a second time. You'd have to ask say a second time. Now you can use Reuse to reuse that same thing. 

So, for instance, if you want to use somebody's name twice in a Smart Clip you could ask them the first time, like this, and then the second time that you want that to appear in the pasted clip you can use Reuse:ask and then the pipe symbol and 1, meaning reuse the first thing that was asked. As an example here, I've got a Smart Clip that does this. So let's go in here and Edit the Smart Clip and you could see it says, do you need, and then it asks how many items. Then it is going to say then we will ship you and then it is going to Reuse that same thing that was inputted here. In fact it is going to Reuse it again a third time right here inside of a calc function. So it is going to take that same number and add one to it, because this is inside a calc function. So, if we use this then it is going to prompt us the one time, when asked is used, and we're going to type in say the number 5. But then it is going to Reuse that 5 here and then Reuse it again in a calculation that gets us the number 6. So this really ups the level of complexity that you can go inside of a Smart Clip. 

So those are the newest features. As I mentioned before Clip Tools is free in the App Store. It's a free Mac App and then once you've downloaded it you just launch it. Then you can use it here in the  Menu Bar as a standard Clipboard Manager. You can Save clips. You can create these Smart Clips. You can Paste things like the  Date and Time. You can do calculations. All sorts of other special functions that you can do inside of Smart Clips involving text. 

Check it out, if you haven't already. Hope you find it useful. Thanks for watching.