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I've been thinking for a long while how limited and obselete is the "copy and paste" (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) behaviour. Others agree with me and that is why klipper exist and MS Word has a clipboard manager. The ability to copy once and past in other place is good for most fast operations, but very limited for other tasks.

Suppose you want to organize some photos, distributed along several folders (or directories if you prefer). You want to reorganize them in categories such as daylight photos, night photos, resolution or any thing you can think of. Suppose there are pictures of all categories in a single folder. Using traditional "copy and paste" would be very boring and splitting dolphin in a lot of views (one for the folder being organized and one for each category, which could be a lot) is impractical. I would not like to discuss this example in depth. If you think this is not a good one, please consider another one that would be more useful to you.

I was thinking in the possibility to have a context menu, while right-clicking some file, such as
copy to -> (or "add selection to group ->")
daylight
night
create new group...

This could be bound to "Ctrl+Shift+C" for instance with a dialog asking to choose the group. Analogous behaviour would happen for pasting (paste from -> (Ctrl+Shift+V)).

Initially, there would be no group (or maybe some pre-configured generic groups, such as "group1", "group2", "temp"). The user would create the groups as (s)he needs it, using the "create new group..." option.

This is useful not only for file copying and pasting but also for text and image resources. I like the idea of having a KDE standard for managing clipboard, based on grouping resources. It would be much better if all software use the same technique, but we can start it providing an implementation for KDE and proving its usefulness, aside of trying what would be the best method for implementing it.

I can think of a sort of things that can make copy and paste much more productive. There should be some way for managing the groups, such as remove some items from a group or removing some or all groups. The main clipboard group should be changeable. With a shortcut one could define the default group on which the shorcuts will act directly. I'm not sure about the best keyboard shortcuts, but this could help to clarify my ideas:

Ctrl+C: Replaces the current content in default clipboard by the new selection/item.
Ctrl+Shift+C: Add selection/item to default clipboard.
Ctrl+Alt+C: popus a context menu or dialog asking for a group. Then replaces the current content of that group with selection/item.
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C: Same as above but add selection/item instead of replace.
Ctrl+V: Paste from default clipboard
Ctrl+Shift+V: Asks for group to paste from.
Ctrl+Shift+A: Alternate default clipboard. Asks for the new default clipboard.

Of course, besides the shortcuts, this options should be well organized in context menus, along with copy and paste menus for those who are not used to remembering tons of shortcuts.

When talking with non-kde software, KDE should always replicate the default clipboard to the one we are used to nowadays.

Any thoughts?

Maybe I have something misunderstood, but whats the difference between your idea and "copy to.." option?

Lukas wrote:Maybe I have something misunderstood, but whats the difference between your idea and "copy to.." option?

They are completely different. "Copy to..." is quite useful but it is not very efficient if one needs to copy a lot of files to some location that is not instantly reached (lots of nested directories). Anyway, the requested feature does not limit to file handling but to any content (text, image, files, etc).

rosenfeld wrote:

Lukas wrote:Maybe I have something misunderstood, but whats the difference between your idea and "copy to.." option?

They are completely different. "Copy to..." is quite useful but it is not very efficient if one needs to copy a lot of files to some location that is not instantly reached (lots of nested directories). Anyway, the requested feature does not limit to file handling but to any content (text, image, files, etc).

Wouldn't be more useful a command to select files? Selected files can be copied or moved by one click.
To refine such operation, following your suggestion, the 'select' command could accomplish a search throughout subdirectories then display result in a new window.

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Pol wrote:
Wouldn't be more useful a command to select files? Selected files can be copied or moved by one click.
To refine such operation, following your suggestion, the 'select' command could accomplish a search throughout subdirectories then display result in a new window.

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You are very concerned about file management instead of the whole idea. The idea is to easy copying and pasting not only for files.

From searching, you suppose all files are organized in a single folder and that it would be easy to write a pattern that would bring the relevant files so that I could select all them (supposing the search would not bring too many files, so that it would be very difficult to select only those wanted). If you read carefully the complete suggestion, you'll see how much improved, powerful and easier is the suggested solution, even to the normal user.

Suppose you already have some content in clipboard you don't want to change, but you want to copy other stuffs to some place before pasting the original clipboard content. How would you easily do that nowadays? And suppose you want to add some content to the clipboard. How would one do that either? I told from the beggining to not concentrate on the given example, and try to formulate another one if it helps to understand the hole idea.

From searching, you suppose all files are organized in a single folder and that it would be easy to write a pattern that would bring the relevant files so that I could select all them (supposing the search would not bring too many files, so that it would be very difficult to select only those wanted).

Maybe you are right. I have not re-read your post. But shouldn't your function require a searching, anyway?

Suppose you already have some content in clipboard you don't want to change, but you want to copy other stuffs to some place before pasting the original clipboard content. How would you easily do that nowadays? And suppose you want to add some content to the clipboard. How would one do that either? I told from the beggining to not concentrate on the given example, and try to formulate another one if it helps to understand the hole idea.

Now i'm afraid i should re-read your post. But aren't your requirements equivalent to the possibility to edit klipper?

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