Cool KDE Plasma trick: [Meta] + [v]

You know how you can use [Ctrl] + [v] to paste in place the last thing you copied to the clipboard, right?

A cool and productive-enhancing variant of that available in #KDE 's #Plasma desktop is that, when copying and pasting a lot of different things, you can hold down the [Meta] (“Windows”) key and hit [v], and a list of all the elements available on the clipboard will pop up so you can choose what to paste next.

@kde

  • tun
    7•3 years ago

    Cool! No need for separate clipboard manager (unless you need more advanced features).

    • *The* Paul BrownOP
      5•3 years ago

      @tun

      Well… the clipboard manager is still necessary 😬 , except you don’t have to go looking for it in the system tray or wherever you put it*.

      And you can do everything without lifting your fingers off the keyboard!

      -–
      * You can hide it and unclutter the tray!

      • tun
        1•3 years ago

        I use clipman in Xfce and bind a keyboard shortcut to popup the menu (my case Ctrl+alt+k).

        Recently I add CB (the clipboard project) to my tools to management clipboard.

    • Kunal Agrawal
      -2•3 years ago

      @tun @Bro666 i hate the fact that we can’t dlt items while in this mode and can’t preview images.

      CopyQ allows so much more.

      • tun
        1•3 years ago

        I tried many and settled for Xfce clipman (fit my need, low RAM usage).

        And I use KDE clipboard applet in KDE.

        Edit: Added KDE counterpart.

  • Nuuskis
    5•3 years ago

    @Bro666 @kde Is there a logical explanation why the clipboard history doesn’t automatically paste the text into the last cursor position?

    • *The* Paul BrownOP
      5•3 years ago

      @Nuuskis @kde

      I don’t know. So you don’t accidentally paste something you didn’t intend to? No idea. Sounds like a good wishlist thing to post to

      https://bugs.kde.org

      I agree that pasting the selected item right away would make the feature even more useful.

    • tubbadu
      2•3 years ago

      On wayland this would be pretty difficult to implement (CopyQ for example does this only on X11). I’m currently working on an enhanced version of the klipboard widget, that should trigger a “fake” paste shortcut after the selection

      • Nuuskis
        2•3 years ago

        @tubbadu Thanks for the explanation! I had no clue it’d be related to compositor at all.

    • Riskable
      1•3 years ago

      It’s a configurable option in Klipper (which is the process that’s handling the clipboard in this video). You can access klipper in your system tray and if you right click on it one of the options lets you open up the settings (it’s also somewhere in system settings I think but I always just get there via the system tray icon).

      You can also configure how many entries it’ll remember, whether it should pop up at the mouse cursor position, and set up regular expressions to recognize certain types of text (e.g. URLs) to perform specific actions.

    • pacjo
      1•3 years ago

      Try this and change shortcut to Meta+V. Doesn’t have the same look and feel as the KDE one (it also pastes on select, but I think this can be turned off)

  • Jae
    1•3 years ago

    Thank you! Nice to know. I’m all about making my workflow quick / efficient, and KDE is so great for doing so!

  • PureTryOut
    0•3 years ago

    @Bro666 @kde Eh, that shortcut does nothing for me and I don’t see any relevant (unassigned) shortcut in system settings. With Plasma 5.27.8, what am I missing?

    • *The* Paul BrownOP
      1•3 years ago

      @bart @kde

      Maybe check the clipboard’s settings?

      Right click on the clipboard icon in your system tray, select “Configure Clipboard…” and check the “Shortcuts” tab (see screenshot).

      • PureTryOut
        1•3 years ago

        @Bro666 @kde Ah there you go, it was unassigned. I’ve set it to the default now and it works great, that makes the clipboard so much more useful! Previously I was manually moving my mouse to click on the tray icon, it was quite inefficient.

        Thanks!

        • *The* Paul BrownOP
          1•3 years ago

          @bart @kde

          It is one of those Plasma things, isn’t it? So much stuff can be configured and tweaked that it is often hard to find where it is you can do the configuring.

          • PureTryOut
            1•3 years ago

            @Bro666 @kde Definitely. In this case I expected it in the shortcuts KCM in system settings but it’s just not there. It probably should be though.

            • *The* Paul BrownOP
              1•3 years ago

              @bart @kde

              It’s a bit of a tough call. The “standard” clipboard is a widget, it does seem to be an integral part of Plasma, but the limits between what is Plasma and what is not are a bit hazy.

              My guess is that, back in the day, the clipboard was an “independent” widget and this is a leftover from that.

              But, you are right: the configure option for the notifications widget opens Plasma Settings, as does the network widget. It does not make much sense that the clipboard be different.