Power Text Pasting with JumpCut and pbcopy

I saw a Twitter Tweet recommending http://www.smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/. That's a nice little OS X app that "saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images." I tried the free demo and it certainly does that. Nice piece of software, just $29.95.

However, I don't use that. While perhaps not quite as convenient or powerful, I find most of my needs are met by JumpCut, a free utility that lets you select from up to 99 cut and paste buffers. That's great by itself, but I soon realized that there are certain pastes I want frequently. The OS X "pbcopy" command lets me load or reload JumpCut with specific text any time I want.

I simply created a "jc" directory and in it I put text files containing text that I might want to paste during the day. A "loadjc" command is a simple shell script that uses "pbcopy" to load these snippets into JumpCut.

I use alphabetic file names: a, b, c etc. Put your most frequently used text in later (alphabetical) files as these will be the first in JumpCut.

cd ~/jc
for i in *
do
 cat $i 
 sleep 1
 cat $i | pbcopy
done
 

I can run that at startup to pre-load JumpCut or I can run it at any time during the day to reload it. This is a simple and effective way for me to keep data ready to paste as needed.

(I found that I needed the sleep for "pbcopy" to work correctly)

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Tue Dec 30 00:32:54 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


I suppose you could run it every ten minutes or so from cron to keep stuff fresh..



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