Jumpcut

You know that funny feeling you get when you discover something wonderful? That sudden resentment of all the lost time you could have spent enjoying your new thing, if only you’d happened across it sooner?

That’s what I felt when I first launched Jumpcut.

It’s one of those wonderfully simple-but-powerful utilities, like Launchbar or LiteSwitch X, that within seconds becomes absolutely essential, to the point that you can’t quite believe it isn’t part of the operating system.

All Jumpcut does is enhance the Clipboard by remembering a history of items you copy, making them available for pasting via a command key combination.

Whack Ctrl-Alt-V (or whatever combination you like) and a translucent window pops up displaying an excerpt of the last item you copied. With the key combination held down, tap the Shift key, and you can scroll through recently copied items. Release the keys, and the currently displayed item is pasted.

That’s it: simple to use, unobtrusive, incredibly useful.

There are some limitations: it only works with copied text, not images, and you can only scroll backwards through your clipboard history, not forwards - rather annoying when you tab too hastily and go past the item you wanted to paste. And it’s a bit buggy, too: from time to time it seems to forget, or muddles up the order of, recently copied items. (I say ‘seems to’ because the frazzled state of my short term memory makes me suspect it is me, not Jumpcut, doing the forgetting). But, for something that’s still beta, is billed as ‘experimental’ and comes with the proviso that the developer ‘cannot promise that Jumpcut will not wreck holy hell with your system’ it works well enough.

If you’re after something a bit more stable, there’s quite a few clipboard-enhancers and replacements out there; most offer much more than Jumpcut in terms of features, but most lack its simple interface.

For those still running OS 10.2.x or willing to tweak the app to work with Panther, PTHPasteboard is the inspiration for Jumpcut and offers similar functionality, but is no longer available through official channels. The dizzyingly clever Quicksilver launching and file manipulation utility has a Clipboard history function, but I never quite got to grips with it - as you can see from the documentation, it’s not the app’s most immediately accessible feature. The shareware utility iClip is somewhere between a scrapbook and a clipboard, letting you store everything from URLs to movies in a floating window that’s a little too obtrusive (on a laptop at least). YouControl is shareware that offers multiple clipboard functionality, but its primary purpose is creating custom menus (for launching applications, controlling iTunes and the like) that sit in the Menu Bar or on the Desktop and at $69.99 it doesn’t come cheap. Finally, Spike is a Rendezvous-aware application for both Mac and Windows that lets users share multiple clipboards over a network. It’s bloody brilliant - I use it a lot in combination with Apple Remote Desktop when tinkering with the old iBook that lives in my wardrobe - but, since you have to switch to Spike and re-copy a stored clipping to the Clipboard before pasting, it can’t match the speed and ease of use that Jumpcut’s command key combinations allow. (And those are just the one’s I’ve tried out - at the time of writing there’s 40-odd clipboard-related tools listed on Versiontracker.)

Where was I? Oh yes: download Jumpcut now. It’s essential, even in its current unfinished, mildly buggy form.

Posted at 1pm on 20/06/04 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
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Tags: applications, mac, osx, writing