What’s new in QCE v3? Advanced editing, Pinned clips, Editor colors, etc.

Advanced editing features

The main addition to Quick Clipboard Editor v3 is the replacement of the basic Windows editor with the powerful Scintilla editor. This allows multiple selections, rectangle selection, multi-line typing, line numbers column, auto-indentation and indentation guides. All these new features are described in this video: Advanced editing in QCE v3 with Scintilla editor.

But that’s not all. Here is a summary of the other improvements found in QCE v3.

Pinned clips

The Pinned clips feature has been completely redesigned. Your frequently used clips will now be easily available in the Pinned clips menu.

You still add or remove Pinned clips in the Manage Pinned clips dialog box (F4) but you now left-click the new Pin button to open the menu and paste the selected clip at the caret position in the editor (you can also use the Alt + 0 to Alt + 9 hotkeys to paste the pinned clips). On the other hand, you right-click the same button to open the menu and edit the selected clip, replacing existing content of the editor.

Editor colors

You now have more control on the colors displayed in the editor. Using the various Text color and Background buttons, select the colors for the Editor, the Line Numbers column and the Window Background.

Also , in Options, Editor Window, you can now select the Light or Dark themes regardless of the Windows settings. If you prefer, you can still stay aligned with Windows dark mode settings with the option Follow Windows.

 

History Search / Quick Paste

You can now paste multiple clips in the History Search and Quick Paste windows. When pasting multiple clips, a configurable separator is inserted between clips.

You can also delete multiple clips from the history database at once. Hit the Delete button to remove the selected clips. Also, you can open the context menu by right-clicking a clip. This menu allows to Delete but also Edit or Paste the clip.

Two other additions to the History Search / Quick Paste windows:

  • a link to Refresh the search results in the history window to see (also triggered with the F5 hotkey);
  • and a link to toggle the Always on top property for the search window.

Finally, a hotkey has been added to open the Quick Paste window and keep it open. Press Ctrl + Win + ` (backtick) to open the Quick Paste window without pasting on release as would to the normal Ctrl + Win + ` hotkey. With the Quick Paste window open, you can use the arrow keys to select an history item in the list, use the Search box at the top of the window to filter the list, select one or multiple clips with the Shift + Click or Ctrl + Click
and hit the Paste, Paste Text, Edit or Delete buttons.

Find / Replace

These new options has been added to the Find/Replace commands. The Find command now supports Backwards, Whole word and Regular expression. The Replace command has the new options Replace All, Whole word and Regular expression (including patterns replacement).

 

Various user interface improvements

  • WELCOME WINDOW: Introduction of a welcome window on the first launch of QCE with options to select Basic Setup or Power User Setup, and to set initial maximum database disk space. Select Help, Show QCE Welcome window to open it after initial launch.
  • STARTUP OPTIONS: A new options under the Options, Launch section to open the editor window and/or history search window at startup.
  • COLOR SETTINGS in the quickclipboardeditor.ini file (not available in the Options dialog box) to change default colors for caret, text selection and indentation.
  • HELP DIALOG REDESIGN: Redesign of the Help, Shortcut Help with tabs for Text Editing hotkeys and QCE commands hotkeys.
 

Clipboard history improvements

  • IMAGE HANDLING IMPROVEMENTS: Fixes for image display sizing (especially for display with screen scaling) and delays to prevent empty display when loading image clips from history.
  • CLIPBOARD OPTIMIZATION: Optimization for handling asynchronous clipboard data transfers (applications writing to the Clipboard with delayed rendering); delayed rendering allows applications writing to the Clipboard to delay the generation of the content for a time-consuming format until it is requested by an application; this makes more complex the code to get the full Clipboard size or content.
  • HANDLING LARGE CLIPS: Preservation of current editor content when a clip exceeds the maximum size.

Interacting with other applications

  • Preparing the ground for integration with Quick Access Popup, allowing to insert QCE commands in your QAP menu. Other apps could also use these messaging commands.
  • COMMAND LIST RETRIEVAL: Ability to send a list of command categories (with descriptions), built-in commands, and saved commands to a calling application.
  • “COPY” COMMAND WITH TIMEOUT: New receiver command “Copy” with an optional timeout to wait for clipboard data.