Take full control of the Windows clipboard with CLCL

If you’ve been using PCs for longer than 5 minutes then you’ve almost certainly run into the limitations of the Windows clipboard, and tried a few clipboard managers to keep a complete history of your copy-and-pasting.

Testing out yet another example in CLCL probably isn’t high on your list of priorities, then. But wait -- it’s way more interesting than you might expect.

The program is portable, a tiny 157KB, and very convenient to use. Unzip the download, launch CLCL.exe, and you can just leave it to monitor your clipboard.

Basic operation is simple. Left-clicking the program’s system tray icon displays a menu of your most recent clipboard items. Text is displayed in its original form, images have a tiny thumbnail included in the menu to help you recognize them, and clicking any item copies it to the current clipboard for use elsewhere.

Need more information? Right-clicking the icon opens CLCL’s clipboard viewer. This is handy on its own as a way to view the contents of the current clipboard in its many possible formats: text, URLs, bitmaps in various formats (with previews), whatever the application created.

The viewer also doubles as a history manager. You’re able to view your full history, delete selected items, move others up or down the list, maybe save items as required (save a bitmap in the clipboard directly to a file, say).

CLCL’s viewer also supports "templates", commonly used items like names, addresses, logos, anything you need on a regular basis. Send a clipboard item to the Templates list and it’ll always be available for copy and pasting.

But maybe the real surprise here is just how configurable this all is. In a click or two you can change mouse actions, tweak the menus to show larger image thumbnails, set a maximum number of history items to preserve, maybe stop your history persisting across sessions if you’re concerned about privacy.

More advanced options include the ability to use custom hotkeys for individual windows (great if there’s a conflict with their own keyboard shortcuts), and you can even tell the program to ignore clipboard actions in certain programs.

It’s not quite all good news. There are even more advanced features here which we couldn’t quite figure out, and there’s no documentation to point you in the right direction.

Still, overall CLCL provides a vast amount of clipboard functionality in an ultra-light package. If you’re tired of more bulky clipboard managers, or just need something more configurable, then give it a try.