Changelog

(yes, 18 years later!)

UI Refresh

• Windows 11 popup menu support, with Light & Dark, translucent (Acrylic) and opaque modes, plus Compact mode and High Contrast support
• Switched from Win32 Classic to Modern Windows theming throughout
• Continued support for Classic Win32 (theme off OS, and forced-classic popups)

Clipboard Formats

• Added full support for multi-facet clipboards, can now restore clips with formatting
• Added native support for other/unknown clipboard formats, no need for per-format plugins anymore (but plugins can still enhance rendering)
• Added Shift+Enter and Shift+Click to paste as plaintext from the paste menu
• Added support for bitmaps (and all other facets) in import/export
• ColorPicker now detects colors in text clipboards and adds custom rendering in the paste preview
• Added a Facets config page to configure the relative priority of renderers
• Added HTML, RTF, Transparent PNG, Data-URIs and more, via MoreFormats plugin

Security & privacy

• Added sensitive clipboard detection to exclude from history and warn (passwords, API keys, etc.)
• Now enforces showing security cricial notifications to prevent a completely invisible ClipX from being installed for malicious purposes
• Added ability to choose between on-disk vs transient-disk vs fully in-memory history (with max in-memory limit)
• Added option to automatically purge history entries older than X
• Added option to automatically purge the full history when the computer locks
• Extended ability to purge history entries between sessions to all clipboard types instead of just bitmaps.
• Turning ClipX history persistance off now wipes prior history storage
• Added confirmation dialog for all clipboard-based executing actions (formerly from SmartNavigate) to clearly identity the program or domain and the data sent with the request.
• Removed Disklog plugin from catalog to avoid it being used for malicious purposes (e.g., installed behind your back with two click, defeating privacy measures)
• Updated http to https everywhere

Hotkeys

• Added conflicting hotkey detection with rebind dialog
• Added ability to set per-item global hotkey to Stickies plugin entries
• Added support for low-level hotkeys (e.g.: can use Win+V in Win11)
• Added hotkey for opening the paste menu in "paste as plaintext" mode
• Added hotkey to clear the entire clipboard history
• Added hotkey to clear all bitmap clipboards

Autostart

• Fixed system-wide autostart to HKLM (was broken in modern Windows) now uses a separate privilege-elevated helper to perform the change.
• Added support for user-specific (i.e., not system-wide) autostart via HKCU without elevation
• Added support for Win8+ overrides to allow reliable autostart re-enable when requested

Notifications

• Added a custom notification renderer so that security-critical notifications can still be delivered without a systray icon, while still supporting older versions of Windows
• Added a notification stack/queue to avoid losing one notification when two activate
• Added a centralized notifications config page
• Added FocusAssist support to quiet down non-essential notifications during focus time.
• Added app-update and plugin-update notifications (user controlled) as internal core functionality so it can work well with the new integrated plugin browser/updater.

Clipboard Search & Management

• Unified Search and Manage
• Added bitmap and facet previews, hex dump, and metadata display
• Added regex / whole word / case insensitive filtering
• Added ability to reorder clipboards
• Added optional separator to combine clipboards (e.g., to build CSV)
• Added bulk deletion
• Added facet extraction into new clipboard entry
• Added facet removal

Plugins Browser

• Completely rewriten the plugin browser for better functionality and UX
• Added extended description, screenshots
• Added installed and upgradable status
• Added search through plugins names and descriptions
• Streamlined the distribution model to wac rather than nsis exe for better UX

Plugins

• MoreFormats (new), to support preview of additional clipboard formats like:
  • RTF and HTML (no scripting, no network, no image loading for your security)
  • PNG, WebP, JPG, TIFF, GIF, provides transparency aware copy/paste and previews
  • Data URIs for all the above formats (automatic decoding previews)
  • Content-sniffing for RTF, HTML (render previews even when copied as text)
• Sharing (new), to securely share clipboards across machines (push/pull).
• MCP (new, local only), to allow AI assistants to read and/or write from/to clipboard history
• Snip (new), a desktop snipping tool with magnifier, annotations with undo/redo, rectangle, window, and freeform based selections with PNG transparency
• SaveToDisk (new), a replacement for the old SaveAsImage plugin by Miguel Garrido, but generalized to save images (jpg, png, etc.), text, and any facet data (text coersion, raw, hex dump).
• Limits, updated to support a global size filter and per-type overrides
• ColorPicker, now renders color info preview, for both picked and text-copied colors
• SmartNavigate is now Actions and allows defining many actions based on rules and fallbacks.
  • Legacy SmartNavigate configurations are migrated to a "SmartNavigate" action.
  • Previously internal "Google Search" hotkey is migrated to a "Web Search" action that can be changed to any other search engine
  • Previously internal "Open URL" hotkey is migrated to an "Open URL" action that can be extended to support any number of schemes. Mailto support was turned into a dedicated rule that now preserves ?subject&body
  • Triggering an action now requires confirmation to ensure that private clipboard information isn't automatically sent to a website, or that harmful programs are not automatically run.

Plugin API

• Added ability to insert a history item without pasting or changing the current clipboard
• Format providers are now format renderers to provide better previews for unknown formats that are otherwise handled by the core in a generic manner, including ability to content-sniff a text clipboard to render it with a specialized preview
• Now exposes a hotkey API to hook into the unified conflict violation detection/rebind/lowlevel support.
• Now exposes a facet-based menu provider, to inject facet-based menu items in all clipboard facet contexts.
• Revamped config read/write API to support atomic ini rewrites for better crash resistance
• Added ability to ask ClipX to restart
• Now exposes owner-drawing capability so it doesn't need to be rewritten by each plugin, and adds acrylic & checkerboard background modes with premultiplied surfaces for transparency support
• Plugins now expose min ClipX version and their SDK version to properly drive version checks

Performance & reliability

• Dramatically improved memory usage for large histories: clipx no longer holds onto the entire history in memory -- unless you want to (see Privacy section).
• Optimized performance when repeatedly copying the same bitmaps
• Fixed potential crash when copying extremely large bitmaps
• Fixed rare race condition that could cause ClipX to miss a clipboard change event
• Improved history storage layout for better crash recovery, automatic orphans reingest, easier inspection, and better support for import/export
• Switched to new (non-collaborative) clipboard viewer API to no longer lose clipboards when another clipboard listener application crashes
• Made "Clear last history entry when clipboard is emptied" only do so if the two matched
• Significantly improved ability to run alongside other clipboard monitors
• All clipboard access now use transactions for reliable reads and writes

Compatibility

• Windows7 sp1 is now the lowest version of Windows supported by ClipX; sorry, this is hard.
• Updated IE plugin browser component to WebView2 for compatibility with Windows 11
• Fixed paste popup fallback position in Win11 when no caret is active
• Fixed popup showing underneath Win11's start menu
• Fixed pasting into Win11's Search box.
• Fixed Win10/11 paste in file rename box
• Fixed defaults that are now in conflicts with modern Windows (e.g., Win+V, Win+G).
• Now warns when Win11 has its own clipboard history enabled, offers to disable it
• Improved deduplication when using Remote Desktop apps with clipboard sync
• Added support for modern clipboard flags CanIncludeInClipboardHistory and ExcludeClipboardContentFromMonitorProcessing
• Installer now offers to download VC7 redists

Misc Changes

• Added carret avoidance in popup placement
• Added preview cycling between different clipboard facets (TAB)
• Moved settings directory to standard local app data rather than roaming.
• Automatically uninstalls Autoupdate plugin, functionality is now internal
• Replaced internal whatsnew.txt dialog with notification and link to website changelog
• Fixed next-to-last preselection when history only has 1 item (stay on last item)
• Graphical menus now provide screen reader text alternative and support type-ahead
• Added systray badge to show when ClipX has been disabled
• History/paste menu now shows an entry #0 for a current-but-unrecorded clipboard
• History/paste menu now show a bullet in front of the current clipboard entry
• Installer now offers to remove a previous ClipX version, including cross-architecture (32->64)
• Regex engine updated to Boost 8.0.0, Actions (SmartNavigate) plugin can choose old and new (Perl vs POSIX) behavior
• Updated license

Misc Fixes

• Fixed actions (SmartNavigate) acting on history item #0 when the current clipboard was not recorded (e.g., due to Limits), the actions are now disabled
• Fixed actions being enabled when the clipboard does not contain text
• Fixed support for dummy text clipboards created by Chrome Remove Desktop (now shows as <empty>)
• Failing to paste from the menu now restores the clipboard that existed before we tried
• Fixed slowdowns when attempting to parse an expensive regex, now limits actions text scope by default
• Fixed filelist serialization failing with some rare paths
• Fixed ColorPicker grey, black and white picks producing a malformed color when copying in the HSL colorspace.
• Fixed support for extremely large texts in Manage's edit box
• Fixed support for slow or unresponsive clipboard renderer applications, now using retries with backoff
• Fixed support for long paths (>260 characters)
• Fixed two shameful GDI handle leaks (opening URLs, opening the paste menu)
• Fixed -p (portable mode) not working when other parameters are present
• Fixed potential config loss when clipx is forcefully terminated while in the middle of saving
• Fixed Limits filtering not always applied or saved
• Fixed ColorPicker encoding/decoding special format characters
• Fixed Actions (SmartNavigate) potential config page crashes in 64 bits builds and navigate-all vs navigate-first not saved in config
• Fixed Stickies disabling of duplicate filtering
• Fixed tiny memory leak when failing to set clipboard data due to being locked in another app
• Fixed saving and respecting of screen corner selection for popup position
• Fixed layout issue for non-square plugin-rendered bitmaps

• Added portable mode (-p on the commandline) to use the ClipX directory for saving/loading prefs and state.
• Fixed saving of configuration on Vista for restricted systems, now saves in Application Data\ClipX folder, unless portable mode is activated.
• Fixed handling of applications reporting invalid caret coordinates, popup falls back to mouse position.
• Made hotkey controls easier to empty out (backspace) and changed "Winkey" to "WIN".
• Added ability to use choose between numpad and normal numbers for pasting 1st to 9th item.
• Added x64 version
• Added plugins browser
• Added whatsnew dialog
• Improved ability to launch applications in Open functionality (ex Navigate)
• Fixed handling of unix & mac style carriage returns in preview tips
• Added support for plugins autoupdate in SDK (updated all plugins, you need to manually update them one last time)
• Added preview tooltip in paste menu (can be disabled and configured in the "popup" config dialog page)
• Changed graphical menu to be disabled by default, since preview tooltip shows the bitmaps as well and is enabled by default (can be reenabled in "popup" config dialog page)
• Fixed failure of multiple instance prevention introduced in beta 4
• Added more SDK functions (paste item, paste arbitrary text)
• Added even more SDK functions, gives the ability to plugins to add support for additional clipboard formats
• Improved reentry handling so that plugins may rely on it (eg, when setting a new clipboard while inside a clipboard event)
• Fixed position of menu when asked not to use caret position
• Fixed systray showing <unsupported clipboard> after selecting "Clear Current"
• Fixed issue with navigation hotkeys introduced in beta 2
• Added ability to clear the last history entry when the clipboard is emptied
• Added support for CF_CLIPBOARD_VIEWER_IGNORE
• Added caption to hidden window so that more tools can detect when ClipX is running ("CLIPX_MAIN")
• Cosmetic changes to General configuration tab
• Added support for reopening popup edit fields in system lists (F2/Single-Click in Explorer windows, Browse dialogs, Desktop, and more)
• Added support for reopening popup edit fields in Total Commander (Shift+F6/Single-Click)
• Added "Combine (oldest first)" and "Combine (newest first)" to the Manage dialog
• Fixed inability to sometimes get the position for the caret
• Fixed crash in search dialog when an <empty> item is present
• Fixed multiuser support bug
• Changed Navigate functionality into generic Open
• Added ability to limit navigating/opening clipboards to URLs only
• Added ability to play an optional sound when a clipboard entry is handled by clipx
• Improved file picker filters
• Added optional hotkey for pasting the last item and removing it at the same time (for cliboard stack behavior)
• Added optional hotkey for pasting all items in the history in reverse order (for clipboard concatenator behavior)
• Added optional hotkey for pasting the second-to-last item without poping the history menu
• Added optional hotkey to open the Manage dialog
• Added support for Win key in hotkey controls
• Fixed inability to set some key combinations as hotkeys
• Added option to use Ctrl|Shift|Alt|Win+NUMPAD 1 to 9 to paste the last 9 clipboards without reordering the history

All in-house plugins

• Added x64 versions.
• Added support for plugins automatic updates (you need to manually update them one last time).

ColorPicker 1.2

• Added eyedropper tool with magnifier.

Smart Navigation 1.2

• Added flag to enable or disable URL encoding on a per expression basis, to be able to open programs with parameters (oops, slight oversight)

• Made betas public
• Made installers for all in-house plugins

AutoUpdate 1.5

• Added support for auto-downloading beta versions

Stickies 1.8

• Fixed shortcut key 'A' for the first entry being ignored

Color Picker 1.1

• Added hotkey for showing a color picking dialog

Smart Navigation 1.1

• Made regexp editing dialog larger
• Added monitoring of clipboard for preview field in regexp editing dialog
• Added pattern for email handling in presets

Smart Navigation 1.0

• Added SmartNavigation plugin, to analyze the clipboard content using regular expressions and navigate based on results

Color Picker 1.0

• Added ColorPicker plugin, to copy the color under the mouse cursor into custom formats

Disklog 1.1

• Fixed bug that disabled clipx's text clipboard support when Disklog plugin was disabled

Disklog 1.0

• Added Disklog plugin, to record text entries permanently in a file

• Fixed crash when used in Firefox 1.5 (if you use the Stickies plugin, you need to update to Stickies 1.7 to fix crashes in Firefox when pasting a sticky)
• Moved clipx.ini to ClipX's directory
• Added ini optimization

• Fixed last history entry in systray tooltip after unsupported clipboard was copied
• Improved startup, does not lose current clipboard anymore, even if it is an unsupported format
• Added auto-navigate option to google hotkey, detects urls and navigate rather than search
• Added double click on systrem tray to open configuration
• Added double click in plugin list to open the plugin's about box
• Added double click in manager to open edit box
• Added double click in search to validate choice
• Added double click in stickies to open edit box
• Grayed out apply button in config until something has changed, you'll want to update your plugins.
• Fixed bottom of plugin configuration pages titles cut off by a few pixels
• Added delete key support and auto-reselect in manager

• Added ability to use the caret for popup position when possible, made it default

• Added support for Explorer file set clipboards

• Fixed problem when pasting within EditPlus
• Added unicode support
• Made text editing internal

• Fixed plugins not found when started from registry
• Fixed duplicate &'s in manage and search lists
• Released SDK

• Improved memory usage
• Improved pasting algorithm to avoid automatic reselection of text box contents by Windows
• Fixed pasting from search box when used from clipboard history
• Fixed drawing glitch with default entry when it is a graphical one
• Fixed menu accelerators sometimes desynchronized
• Added accelerators to several dialogs items
• Updated stickies plugin

• Fixed bug with saving of history, so much for betatesting!
• Improved stickies plugin (added editing, add from saved history)

• Revamped config dialog
• Fixed ignore bitmap/text entries
• Added multi-user support
• Added Clear History/Clear Bitmaps
• Added Purge bitmaps between sessions
• Added configurable system tray icon (now defaults to a 256 colors one)
• Added Navigate to current clipboard content
• Added Google search current clipboard content (optional Auto-quoting)
• Fixed bitmap popup entries accelerator alignment
• Fixed bitmap popup entries for very small bitmaps (< 8x8)
• Added plugins support, SDK on its way
• Fixed duplicate accelerator
• Lots of tiny, almost unnoticeable but well worth it cosmetic changes

• Fixed crash when loading sessions from ClipX < 1.0.1.0

• Fixed crash introduced in 1.0.2.3 (oops)

• Fixed menu alignment with multiple monitors when not using mouse position

• Fixed systray tip change, Added left click on systray, fixed rare assert bug

• Added XP manifest, Added current clipboard in systray tip

• Added bitmap clipboards support

• Fixed cosmetic bug

• Added Save/Load history - Added option to run at startup

• Added Clear current

• Added popup menu placement setting

• Added Search

• Added Edit/Delete

• Cosmetic changes, First public release

• Everything's new