[UX] Cycle items and paste with single hotkey

[gerardbosch]

Hi there! The goal of the following would be to improve the usability and it is inspired by Ditto (a Windows clipboard manager).

Preconditions:

• You enabled a hotkey to open the CopyQ history window in CopyQ settings. To move on with the example, let's say the hotkey is Ctrl-; on English US keyboard (could be the one of your choice).

General idea

You want to paste, not the item at the tip the history, but one of the items at the top-most (say the second or third item).

Currently you have to do a lot of keystrokes just to paste the second/third/... item:

• Ctrl-; - which opens the history
• ↓..., ⏎ - move down (n times), paste

which means moving the hands a lot from the home row and involves a lot of fingers, just to paste something recent.

In Ditto, you can do the following just to achieve the equivalent result, only involving the hotkey (Ctrl-; in the example):

• hold Ctrl, ;, ;, release Ctrl - Will open the history window, cycle to the second item on the second ; keypress, and just paste it, closing the history, on Ctrl release.
• hold Ctrl, ;, ;, ;, release Ctrl - Cycle to the third item and paste it.

😍 You can quickly paste recent items by Ctrl-;...;

(Of course if you want to paste the first item, you don't need the history and just do Ctrl-v 😄)

Use case example 1: Sequential copy/paste

• You sequentially copy 3 strings (snippets/whatever) to your clipboard.
• Then, you want to paste it in the same order they were copied.
• You do:
  • Ctrl-;;; - to paste the first copied item/the third in the stack (once third item is pasted it becomes the first in the history)
  • Ctrl-;;; - to paste the second copied item (now the third in the stack)
  • Ctrl-;;; - to paste the third copied item (idem)

Very convenient, as you can repeat the same pattern ;;;, and don't even need to think which position the item you want takes (you copied 3 items, you just issue 3 ;).

Use case example 2: Just paste the second item

Here you're sure only need to paste the second (or whatever) item, you do:

• Ctrl-;; - done! (or ;;; or whatever :)

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N.B. For a more complex history browsing, you can still do the usual Ctrl-; to open the history, browse with the arrows, and paste with return | or use the search, which is great :)

[hluk]

See: #1948 (comment)

[gerardbosch]

Thanks for your support, it totally worked! :D