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Managing Text Clipping Snippets On Mac OS X
Just in case you somehow missed this, Mac OS X will create a "Clipping" file if you just drag a chunk of selected text to your desktop. You can later drag that back anytime you want to paste the same chunk somewhere else. That's nice - it augments the Clipboard Utility that I use. But there were several things I did not like about Clippings so I seldom used them.
First, I didn't like them cluttering my Desktop. They take their names from the text you cut, which tends to fill up your desktop with lots of oddly named files. It's messy, and it's not easy to quickly find the Clip you want.
That's especially true if you have clips with similar starting text. But look what happens if you drop the clippings into another folder and use the Preview view:
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I have this folder on my Desktop so that I can more easily drag text to it, but with spring loaded folders you could keep it anywhere. I get to see the contents and can just click in the Preview to drag the clip anywhere I want to paste it.
This makes Clippings much more useful for me.
To drag a Clipping into Gmail Compose, you must be in "Plain Text" mode.
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Sun Jan 25 02:21:59 2009: PatrickGallagher
http://blog.macadmincorner.com
Wow, I forgot about clippings. I used to use it all the time in OS 9. Though I notice Leopard doesn't have a quick view plug-in for clippings. I would think that would have been a simple thing for Apple to do.
Sun Jan 25 02:46:47 2009: TonyLawrence
Yeah, I had kind of forgotten them too but actually they are kind of handy for oft-repeated text.
Fri Oct 23 16:23:13 2009: anonymous
What a great tip...so much easier than 'shelf' for quicksilver!! thanks mate!
Wed Sep 29 10:50:51 2010: Fab
There used to be better functions to convert clippings (either text, sound or image) into files under OS 9. Sadly this function isn't there anymore
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