Reliability vs Speed: Optimizing QCE for your system

When saving clips to the database or pasting content into applications, Quick Clipboard Editor (QCE) introduces strategic execution delays to ensure reliability. These delays allow for smooth interaction between QCE, the AutoHotkey engine, Windows Clipboard, and your target applications.

While these delays are essential for success, their default durations may be longer than necessary for high-performance systems, or too short for slower machines. Adjusting them allows you to find the perfect balance between responsiveness and stability.

Adjusting Delay Settings

First, you can customize the global execution delay in the Options, Various dialog box.

  • Execution delay multiplier: In the Options, Various dialog box, the value execution delay multiplier (default: 3) acts as a global scale for all individual delays. This is the easiest way to speed up or slow down the entire app at once.
    • Example: If a delay is set to 100ms and your factor is 3, the actual delay is 300ms. Changing the factor to 1.5 reduces it to 150ms.
    • Note: Starting with v3.3, the old DelayFactor in the [Delays] section is obsolete; use the Options, Various dialog box instead.

If, using the global execution delay, you confirmed that some delays need to be increased, you can customize more specific settings in the quickclipboardeditor.ini file (Options, Edit Quick Clipboard Editor.ini) under the [Delays] section. This could allow to reduce the global execution delay for other operations. For example, if you increased the Clip maximum size (in MB) in Options, Clipboard History to load larger images, you may need to tweak the LoadHistory_Bitmap and LoadHistory_Bitmap2 values under the [Delays] section of the QCE ini file.

  • Individual Delays: Under the [Delays] section of the quickclipboardeditor.ini file, you can fine-tune specific operations (values are in milliseconds).
  • Reading the Clipboard: The GetClipboardMaxLoops setting (default: 5) determines how many times QCE retries reading the Clipboard if it is busy before giving up. Each loop waits for GetClipboardData_LoopIn × GlobalDelayFactor.

Default Delay Values

If you need to reset these, you can simply delete the [Delays] section in your .ini file and restart QCE. Here is the list of delays with short descriptions and default values.

Category Setting Default Description
User Interface BuildGuiEditor_AfterShow 100 Wait after the main editor window opens.
OpenHistoryQuickPaste_AfterShow 100 Wait after the Quick Paste window opens.
Pasting Logic PasteFromQCE_Active 300 Delay when pasting into the QCE editor.
PasteFromQCE_Inactive 10 Delay when the QCE window is not focused.
PasteFromQCE_KeepOpenIn/Out 300 Buffer for “Keep Open” behavior during paste.
HistorySearchPaste_Multiple 100 Interval between items when pasting multiple clips.
PasteFromHotkey_Pinned 100 Timing for pasting pinned clips via hotkey.
Clipboard Ops GetClipboardData_LoopIn 200 Wait time during retry loops when reading Clipboard data.
ClipboardIsFree_Loop 100 Pause while checking if the system clipboard is busy.
EditorCopyToClipboard_Update 250 Buffer after updating clipboard from the editor.
CopyOpenQCEHotkey_AfterCopy 100 Delay after copy command before QCE opens.
GuiInspectClipboardLoadImage_BeforeSetBitmap 200 Delay before loading an image from Inspect Clipboard.
History & DB LoadHistory_Bitmap / 2 100 / 200 Timing for loading image previews in history.
DeleteClip_BeforeUpdate/After 200 Safety buffers when removing clips from database.
CleanUpBeforeExit_CloseDb 500 Ensures database saves correctly on exit.
RemoveOldTemporaryFolders 10000 Delay after launch before purging the temp directory.
External Apps Proofreading_OpenApp1 / 2 500 / 1000 Delays for launching proofreading tool.
Proofreading_AppLoginSeconds 60 (s) Timeout for external app login (in seconds).
ImageEditor_OpenApp1 / 2 700 / 1000 Delays for launching external image editor.
ImageEditor_CloseApp1 1200 Delay after copying the image to Clipboard and before closing the editor.

(Note: Values above are base values before the Global Multiplier is applied.)

Important Notes

  • Version Compatibility: For users of QCE before v3.3, please note that the values DelayFactor, GetClipboardFormats_LoopIn, GetClipboardFormats_LoopTries, EditorContentChanged_Dark, EditorContentChanged_In and GetClipboardBytes_LoopIn are no longer used.
  • Apply Changes: You must save the quickclipboardeditor.ini file and restart QCE for any changes to take effect.
  • Support: If you are unsure which value to tweak, feel free to ask for help on the community forum.