What's New In ClipTools 1.5

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you what's new in Clip Tools 1.5.

MacMost and ClipTools are brought to you by a great group of supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.  

In case you don't know ClipTools is a Clipboard Manager for macOS that I created that you can get for FREE from the Mac App Store. To find out more about it you can get a link to the Mac App Store. Go to MacMost.com/Clip Tools. Version 1.5 just came out so let me show you what's new. 

The first new feature is that in ClipTools you've got what's called the Clip Manager. You go to that and you get a window like this that allows you to see your regular clips, everything that gets copied to the Clipboard and then Clip Tools picks it up or your manually saved clips and your SmartClips. Now the new feature is this button here. This allows you to search your clips. So say you want to search your regular clips. You can click it and then you get a little Search Box there at the top and you can type something. So, for instance you can just type some letters like o and you see here I've got all the clips that contain that. It looks for just consecutive letters, nothing complex. No boolean searching or anything like that. But it does include the term app and then a colon after it and then start typing the name of the app. So for instance if I type text and TextEdit it will only show me clips that were copied from TextEdit. When you are in the clip manager you could also use Command F to bring up the search box and just type and Command F or clicking this button here removes the Search Box. 

The ability to search clips was a much requested feature and another one is the ability to Snooze ClipTools. So it doesn't look at your Clipboard for a little while. So to get to that you go to the ClipTools Menu. But before you click it you hold the Option key down and then you click and it brings up the alternative menu. Here the top item is now Snooze Clip Capture and you can choose a time here or enter your own time manually. So, for instance, if I want to snooze for 5 minutes and it won't capture any clips during that time I can select it. Now if I were to go and select something like this and Copy with Command C, if I look in ClipTools you can see it didn't actually grab it. If you want to see how much time is left just use the Option Key and click again and it will show you how much time is left here and you also have the ability to end it early with this item. 

Now the biggest new feature in 1.5 is the addition of a lot of new functions for Smart Clips. Smart Clips are these intelligent programable clips that you can have do all sorts of things. So the first thing I did in 1.5 is I completely rewrote the engine for Smart Clips. All the old Smart Clips should work just as before. But nesting works better.  Before there was just an order to things. For instance the selection function worked first before the Ask function. But now things are actually nested. So if a selection function is inside of an app function, the selection function works simply because it is inside the larger function and than the one outside works. Just like using parentheses in math. 

But the biggest new feature by far is the addition of all sorts of new functions that mimic all of the different functions that you can use in the Menu. So before there were only a few things you can do in Smart Functions. But now you can do all sorts of things that you see in the menus here. Like changing case or doing special actions. So to demonstrate the changes let's first create a Smart Clip. I'm going to bring up the ClipManager and then I'm going to go to Smart Clips and create a new Smart Clip here. So as a demonstration this is going to paste in this text but there is an Ask function here. It is going to ask and prompt with product name. I'm going to set a keyboard shortcut for this. I'm going to set it as Shift Command and X so I can easily evoke this. So, when I use it here in this TextEdit document it will prompt me for the product name and I can type a product name. Then press Return and you can see here the Ask function placed the text I typed right there. 

But let's take a look at what we can do that's new. Now you can add a second parameter to Ask that is the default. So, for instance, if the default is widget A, like that, then I can evoke this function and you can see it gives me some default text there which can be really handy. I can still change it but the default is there to begin with. But in addition I can put a function inside this. So this is where nesting comes in. If I use the Clip Function and do Clip 1 it's going to take whatever the first item is in the clip list and use that as the default. So if I were to select lazy here and copy it and then go and evoke the Smart Clip you can see it took my last copied thing and made that the default. Or I can use Selection here and then we use that as the default. So if I type widget C here and selected it and then evoked the Smart Clip you can see it took the selection there as the default and I can change it or just use Okay to accept it.

Now you can also use the Pick function as before and give it various items to select from. You're using the pipe character here to divide them. So if I were to use this you could see I get those items here and I can select one or I can type as well. But a new thing that can be done is instead of Pick you can just use pick-clip like that and now it's going to give you a Chooser as before but it is going to give you all of the items that you have in your Clip List. So if you have ClipTools set to remember your last ten things copied to the clipboard that's what you'll find here. Or you can use pick-clip and then colon and then give it a number. This will just be the last end item. So in this case that last three items that have been copied to the clipboard. 

 Now previously there existed a Replace function. What the Replace function did is if you put it at the end it just looked back at the entire Smart Clip from before and replaced one thing with another. You can still do that. So, for instance, that last one if I use it is going to replace these words and with ampersands, like that. But what's new is that you can have a Start and an End now. So instead of say replacing the word and with something we can have from the characters som to the characters lse and replace those with some more text here. Now you can see it's going to replace from here to here with that text. So I'll give it a try and you can see how it works. In addition if you were to eliminate an item, just have it be a blank space there, then it will go to the end. Or if you eliminate this one, like that, then it will be from the beginning to this text. 

But it is a little weird that Replace works when you put it at the end. With nesting now I wanted to have a function where you can nest the text inside it. So, there's a new function called Sub which basically does the same thing except the first parameter is the text that it is going to act on. So it can act on only part of the Smart Clip. In this case it is going to substitute  inside this, the selection, and it's going to substitute the word and with an ampersand. So now if I use it you can see it basically produces the same thing. But I could have put more things before or after this Sub function. Whereas with Replace it just works on the entire contents of the Smart Clip. You can still add another parameter where it would work from one thing to another thing and leaving it blank will mean from one thing to the end or from the beginning to a certain set of characters. 

Now let's talk about Special Actions. In ClipTools if you go down to Selection Actions you can do things like convert to number words or URL Encode, to strip tags, to all sorts of thing like that. These are all now functions in Smart Clips. So I can certainly use this still to convert that to these words here. But I could also create a Smart Clip that does it. So action colon and the variety of different Sub functions, in this case number-words is the one that I want, and what I want to act on is the selection. So, if I were to use this with the keyboard shortcut you could see how it works. Just like it would if I use the menu. I could change Selection here with Clip colon 1 to work on the last thing that I copied. So, for instance, if I've got other numbers here, like this, I can select it, copy it, go somewhere else and use the special function where the Smart Clip is going to take the last thing copied, convert it to number words, and then paste it, like that. 

Now you also have the change selection case submenu. So you can change the case to all sorts of things. For instance I can capitalize all the words here and you can see how that works. I can now have that function inside of Smart Clips. So it is just the function Case and then the Sub function, in this case words.Then it is going to act on the selection. So I can now use that keyboard shortcut to do the same thing. Or I can change this to say use the previously copied clip. So now I can copy this, go somewhere else and use the Smart Clip to paste it but with all the words capitalized. 

Let's go back to the original example but I'm going to now put pick-clip 3, pick from the last three things that were copied and put that nested inside of case:words. So now I can copy three things, like that, and then when I use the Smart Clip you could see those three things are here. When I select one and use it, it capitalizes the words in there. Or here's one that's going to take the selection and that is nested inside Action number words, so convert it to words and that is nested inside a function to have all the words capitalized. So now I have the opportunity to not only convert that to number words but they are all capitalized, like that. 

I even incorporated the Lorem Ipsum text into a function in Smart Clips in case you want to use it. So, for instance, here's a Smart Clip that just has some regular text. But then it is using the Lorem function. It is looking for words and it is going to have nine words. So now when I use the Smart Clip I get those words in that part of the clip. Since Lorem Ipsum is randomly generated when I try to use it again I'll get different words. 

So here's something a little different that I added into Smart Clips. You can use the simple function web to take whatever is in the Smart Clip and it will just try to open that up in a web browser. So in this case it is just going to take the selection and open it up in the browser. Now when you use this with something that's URL, like MacMost.com, and then you select it and now since the Smart Clip is going to take the selection and then try to open up in the web look what happens. You can see how it opened up the web browser and it went to that URL. But, if you were to not have it be a URL, have it be just a word or set of words, it instead will interpret it as a search term. It will do a search. Let's try this one. You can see how it just does a search using that term. You can even specify what search engine you want. Just put colon and then the name of that engine. There are a few in there in the documentation. So Goggle will use the Goggle search engine instead and you can see I get the results there. 

You can use this in creative ways, For instance here is a URL that goes to  a YouTube video. But with some extra data tacked onto the end including a time to start. Let's say I want to strip all of that out. I could do that with a Smart Clip that looks like this. It takes a selection and then it starts with a question mark and goes to the end and replaces it with nothing. So basically everything after the question mark is going to get replaced by the Sub function. When I try to use this on the selection, like that, you can see it works really well. Now, I can further alter that and say don't actually paste it. Instead go to that webpage. So now when I try to use it with this it will actually just go to this as the webpage. This can be handy in all sorts of different situations. 

There is a lot of other things as well. For instance both Replace and Sub can be case insensitive. There is a function to handle things in the Numbers stacks of ClipTools. In other words getting to sum or the average or just a list of all the numbers in the stack. Then there are endless ways to combine and nest all of these things in Smart Clips. Since each Smart Clip could have its own custom keyboard shortcut there is almost nothing you can do with ClipTools now that you can't assign a custom keyboard shortcut to. So these are all pretty advanced functionality. If you're just looking for a basic clipboard management tool then ClipTools can just be that. You don't need to get into these Smart Clips to get a lot out of Clip Tools.

Hope you like all the changes. Thanks for watching.