Keep clipboard history forever

[Karl87]

to push this thread up again, still very much interested in any (official) solution to store the clipboard history indefinitely (maybe saving it to a normal text file every 3 months (or so)

[Karl87]

On 7/14/2019 at 6:11 PM, theSquashSH said:

 

I've created a script that handles the backup of the db, merging it with an
infinite-history sqlite db in my home folder, and searching functionality.

Full source: alfred-clipboard.sh (it's a fully functional infinite-history solution for Alfred, with backup, search, exporting, etc.)

 

Thank you very much for taking the time!

Do I need to create a file in my home folder for this to work? And/or could you or someone else post a short instruction on how to make this script run?

[Alfred_powerUser]

I am obsessed with Alfred's clipboard history, it's quick raw extremely reliable and extremely functional form factor and versatility. My concern is that I use it as a replacement for reminders/note keeping  as it's way more convenient to quickly type something and copy it, then later when need to recall it, simply search based on specific reminding characters.

The problem is that this only remains available for only three months and that's extremely unfortunate. I also use BetterTouchTools on my Mac and they offer clipboard history to remain for up to one year, but the form factor just isn't as convenient as Alfred since Alfred just offers more.

I am aware that memory management might the reason why it's capped to three months, but I only use it for text, and have disable it for images and files, so maybe that should make it a but more manageable, especially since BTT's clipboard offers it with no issues.

[deanishe]

Hi @Alfred_powerUser, welcome to the forum.

 

This topic has been discussed several times before. I'm merging this thread with the previous request for the same feature.

[Sharkme]

+ 1 on this. I understand the concern about some users just setting it to unlimited and not understanding the consequences.

 

Proposed temp solution: Have a hidden option somewhere (Maybe only enabled if ~/alfred_infinite_history.txt is present). Or I'm sure a smarter way can be found.

[Takaya]

==google translate==

For example, set ".ZSH_HISTORY" to "SaveHist = 1000000".
It is not 3 months to maintain plain text, but it is good to be 1000000 or 10000000.

When reading old things, latency may occur.

 

History of almost endless clipboard. I want to pay money...

[akaralar]

I too would love to have infinite (or as close to infinite as possible) text retention, I wanted to voice my support for the feature request.

 

Thanks for all the great work, I can't imagine using macOS without Alfred.

[pbd]

Alfred's Unlimited clipboard history is still a HUGE improvement we're waiting to be included as a configurable option..

WE REALLY NEED THIS!!!!! 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

[baconCheeseFry]

I really need this as well. I use the clipboard history dozens of times per day, and, like others, I tend to have infrequent but needed items in history. 

[joseb]

Sorry for spamming everyone.. but I just wanna bump this thread to see if anyone's figured out a way around this limitation? I see the case the developers are making: "Let's save people from themselves." However, there has to be a middle ground. 3 months seems very low and arbitrary. This is especially true for the more pro power users.

 

There's so many potential options in between. For example:

- Warn users about the performance risk if query takes more than X seconds (''Looks slow.. maybe it's because your clipboard history is really huge. Click here to purge.")

- Change the unit from time (3months) to something like space (2gb max)

- etc etc.

 

I'm 1000% certain my system can handle way more than 3months of history (sorry for the humble brag - just got my M1 Max 🤓)

 

Would love some iteration here.

[alfredpanda]

4 hours ago, joseb said:

Sorry for spamming everyone.. but I just wanna bump this thread to see if anyone's figured out a way around this limitation? I see the case the developers are making: "Let's save people from themselves." However, there has to be a middle ground. 3 months seems very low and arbitrary. This is especially true for the more pro power users.

 

There's so many potential options in between. For example:

- Warn users about the performance risk if query takes more than X seconds (''Looks slow.. maybe it's because your clipboard history is really huge. Click here to purge.")

- Change the unit from time (3months) to something like space (2gb max)

- etc etc.

 

I'm 1000% certain my system can handle way more than 3months of history (sorry for the humble brag - just got my M1 Max 🤓)

 

Would love some iteration here.

Why do you want your clipboard to act as your second brain? Do you have any other filing system? If I wanted to recall something 3 months on it'd be stored in Apple Notes. Shorter than that would be a task in Trello. Something I want to recall more often might be saved in 1Password, or simply as a snippet in Alfred.

 

 

Edited October 30, 2021 by alfredpanda

[joseb]

Quote

Why do you want your clipboard to act as your second brain? Do you have any other filing system? If I wanted to recall something 3 months on it'd be stored in Apple Notes. Shorter than that would be a task in Trello.

I don't. I use Roam as my second brain. I 100% agree that this is a first world problem. 😆 🤷🏽‍♂️  But then again isn't that the point Alfred? To improve workflow? Asking "Why don't you just switch to Apple notes?" is like asking "Why don't you just open the /Applications folder and double click on the app you want to open, instead of using Alfred?"

 

The clipboard workflow gives us a unique workflow which I find very valuable because I can quickly access snippets without having switch contexts or define/name a snippet. I don't have to plan for reuse (because often I don't know that i'll need to reuse until I do). That's the whole point. All the arguments here about other ways to accomplish the same time are all completely valid. They're also completely besides the point.

 

 

[deanishe]

28 minutes ago, Kajeh said:

So I change these value from 3 to 4

 

Yeah. That’s because persistFor = 3 doesn’t mean “3 months”, it means “4th option”, i.e. “3 months”. Don't mess with those files unless you know exactly what you're doing.

[Kelson01]

On 11/26/2017 at 3:59 PM, Andrew said:

While I'm not completely closed to the idea of increasing potential capacity of the clipboard history (search performance implications aside), I'd like to understand when 3 months of text isn't enough.

 

If you use an item from the clipboard history, it moves to the top of the list, effectively resetting the 3 month timer on that item. So really, the 3 month limit is "items in the clipboard history which I haven't used in the last 3 months".

 

Anything you need longer than this would surely be better suited to a snippet? (It's extremely easy to convert a clipboard item to a snippet by using cmd+s on it in the clipboard history view).

 

Cheers,

Andrew

 

I was browsing the forum and found this old thread - It still applies today and I'm going to add to it.

 

I like to search my clipboard history because I copy & paste a lot of things, I copy things I think I might need later (such as scripts I find or solutions for an issue) -> If I find the issue pressing I copy and paste into notes and search with a notes workflow (I think that should be added to Alfred officially by the way) but I don't always do that - It's easy to remember a part of something copied, if not exactly what it contains, enough to search for it. 

 

I think it's more about having the option to go indefinitely that a lot of users might will appreciate. We all have different uses for Alfred. 

 

If the concern is having such a large cache of copied clipboard items to the point that Alfred would have trouble, I understand. I think a good solution to this would be allowing you to have more control over what gets deleted after a specified time period.

Something like:

 

[Save Clipboard Contents Indefinitely]

[Advanced Setting -> Remove Plain Text from clipboard history after 3 months if more than 2,000 characters]

[Advanced Setting -> Remove Images from Clipboard After 3 months if larger than 2MB]

And if that would cause slowdowns Alfred could check the age of clipboard items once per day or something

 

This would help people manage their growing clipboard

 

Of course you'd be able to remove clipboard items older than [x] "manually" even with keep contents indefinitely enabled.

 

It's just a thought, I don't think it would hurt to add it

[deanishe]

20 hours ago, Undertaker01 said:

If the concern is having such a large cache of copied clipboard items to the point that Alfred would have trouble

 

This is precisely the issue. An option to keep the clipboard history indefinitely is a ticking time bomb. It’s inevitable that some proportion of users will run into issues as a result. Given enough time, every user will run into issues with it.

 

Andrew just doesn't add features like that to Alfred. If it's obviously going to cause issues and support requests, it's effectively off the table.

 

20 hours ago, Undertaker01 said:

Remove Images from Clipboard After 3 months if larger than 2MB

 

Clipboard images are uncompressed bitmap data, which is frequently 20+ times the size of PNG/JPEG data. As a point of reference, a 1400x1400px bitmap is 8MB. A JPEG or PNG version might only be 50kB.

Edited December 29, 2021 by deanishe

[Kelson01]

1 minute ago, deanishe said:

 

This is precisely the issue. An option to keep the clipboard history indefinitely is a ticking time bomb. It’s inevitable that some proportion of users will run into issues as a result. Given enough time, every user will run into issues with it.

 

Andrew just doesn't add features like that to Alfred. If it's obviously going to cause issues and support requests, it's effectively off the table.

 

 

Clipboard images are uncompressed bitmap data, which is about 20x the size of PNG/JPEG data. As a point of reference, a 1280x720 bitmap is about 4MB.

 

Oh okay, I understand.

 

Maybe a good alternative feature would be something similar to copying except it saved it to a permanent searchable database within Alfred. (much like clipboard history but amplified) - It would be made clear that this is for things you wish to save for later reference and not as a clipboard replacement because it would work differently. I could see something like that being added, it would be a good alternative to this and I would definitely use it. There's many times throughout the day when I see something and I know I might want to use it but I don't want to distract myself at that time...

 

Speaking of being distracted there was 3 things I was doing before now and each of those things leads back to something else I wanted to do but I keep finding things and going down rabbit holes that lead to more things! If only I could have copied these things in a searchable database for later reference! I have like 400 tabs open because that forces me to look at things later because eventually those tabs need to be closed. Manually. Reading lists and watch laters never get looked at because there's so much competing for my attention. Clipboard history doesn't precisely work for this because it's not intended for this purpose, but searchable database would. Perhaps file actions for the feature could be "add to notes" and "create reminder" or "message to" "email to" that would be handy. 

 

Speaking of notes! I have a workflow that searches apple notes - but that is something that could be added right into Alfred and fit right in!

[deanishe]

1 minute ago, Undertaker01 said:

Maybe a good alternative feature would be something similar to copying except it saved it to a permanent searchable database within Alfred

 

That's already how it works. The clipboard history is an SQLite database.

 

2 minutes ago, Undertaker01 said:

I could see something like that being added

 

The problem remains the same. Andrew isn't going to add a button that enables the storage of unlimited amounts of data. It's a footgun. That effectively disqualifies it as a potential official feature.

 

Perhaps a feature that exports expiring history items instead of deleting them, making it easier to build a workflow to search them. But it must be a workflow. We aren't going to get an official feature that might fill up your disk or murder search performance, regardless of how awesome it might be.

[Kelson01]

14 minutes ago, deanishe said:

 

That's already how it works. The clipboard history is an SQLite database.

 

 

The problem remains the same. Andrew isn't going to add a button that enables the storage of unlimited amounts of data. It's a footgun. That effectively disqualifies it as a potential official feature.

 

Perhaps a feature that exports expiring history items instead of deleting them, making it easier to build a workflow to search them. But it must be a workflow. We aren't going to get an official feature that might fill up your disk or murder search performance, regardless of how awesome it might be.

 

Do you think an alternative alternative would be to bake in support for searching apple notes & allow you to add clipboard text to a specific note or selected text to note with a shortcut? It's similar but I doubt it will cause the same issues - Set a limit to how much text can be added at once so people can't crash their computer with a billion characters added to a note. Maybe these ideas aren't good ones, I don't know.

[deanishe]

Personally, I would either use one of the SQL scripts on the forum that alters the dates in Alfred's clipboard history database so nothing ever expires, or export the old entries to a separate SQLite database and search that with a workflow.

 

Keeping the data forever is absolutely fine as long as you don't go nuts.

 

I just don't see it being an official feature because it would cause support requests.

[Kelson01]

19 hours ago, deanishe said:

Personally, I would either use one of the SQL scripts on the forum that alters the dates in Alfred's clipboard history database so nothing ever expires, or export the old entries to a separate SQLite database and search that with a workflow.

 

Keeping the data forever is absolutely fine as long as you don't go nuts.

 

I just don't see it being an official feature because it would cause support requests.

 

I might just create a macro or script to insert what's on the clipboard to a note, I don't want to accidentally mess up Alfred and become one of those support requests (lol) - This would work for me because I always have like 15 notes windows open that are specifically resized by Moom because I'm insane.

[KennyP]

If we can't have the history forever, can we at least have it longer than 3 months pleaseeeeee?

[joseb]

I haven't upgraded to Alfred 5 yet mainly because I haven't needed to.. but if this is included in a future version i'm 100% gonna pay to upgrade. 

[leeleblanc]

Still a +1 for me.

Or +12 really because a year is ideal. Also, might this be solved by Alfred running a sorta-kinda backup job to prevent bloat? So Alfred stays at the 3 month limit. But, Alfred exports it's history every three months to prevent bloat. Then have a function in Alfred where you can use the clipboard itself to view into a 'clipboard history archive' so you're not keeping everything in the clipboard history. You're instead referencing an archive. Then you search those backups for the entry you want to find through the clipboard...

idk really what I'm talking about other than, if not three months, can we have 6 months?

[akaralar]

I just want to +1 this. Have been a user close to 10 years maybe and in my opinion this is the only thing that is missing from Alfred. Images could expire, I have no problem with that but I think there should at least be an option to make text permanent.

 

I have my terminal history for 10 years and it doesn't cause any problems in terms of size for me, and actually quite the contrary, it has proved to be useful too many times for me to expect this feature from a power user tool like Alfred. 

 

I can't say how the implementation will work but I trust the judgment of the team here, they know how to make features performant. I'm sure there is a way to make this possible.

 

I love Alfred, thanks for the great product, I genuinely wish we can see this feature in Alfred.