PasteFlow: A Paste Stack & Paste Queue for Alfred. Pin & Reuse Text, Files, and More.

[gloogloo]

PASTEFLOW

A Paste Stack & Paste Queue for Alfred. Pin & Reuse Text, Files, & More

~ Full Documentation ~ | ~ Latest Release ~ | ~ Video Overview ~ | ~ Rich Text & Files Update Video ~

 

 

REQUIREMENTS

• This workflow uses Alfred Clipboard history. You don't have to be using Alfred as your main Clipboard Manager, just make sure you don't turn this feature off

 

WHAT IS IT

PasteFlow is a handy paste stack (or paste queue) for Alfred. It lets you create a list of pinned items that you can organize, edit, and use in different ways. Ever needed to copy text from various places and put it all in one final spot? PasteFlow makes this easy. No more switching back and forth to copy and paste one item at a time. Save time and stay in flow by doing all your copying first, then pasting later when you're ready. Since your items are saved in an actual list, you can even take a break, copy other things, and come back to your stack whenever you want.

 

 

HOW TO

If you're already familiar with paste stacks, you can start using PasteFlow right away with its default settings. Here's how to get started:

Add items to your stack:

• Select text and use Pasteflow actions on them.
• Set up your preferred hotkeys (green color-coded hotkeys are the most basic/essential).
• Use PasteFlow's keyword to add items from your Clipboard to your stack.

 

Process your saved items

The easiest way to do this is to set up a hotkey (in green), but you can also use PasteFlow's keyword directly on Alfred's bar.

• Paste items to your current window
• Copy items back to your clipboard

 

View & edit your stack:

• Set up hotkeys (red-coded hotkeys show your entire list)
• Enter "Selective Mode" from Alfred's Bar using PasteFlow's keyword
• Use Textview Mode (type :View with PasteFlow's keyword)

 

That's all you need to get started! But if you want to explore more, PasteFlow has lots of other useful and powerful features.

 

 

SOME FEATURES:

• Items can be added at the top (use it as a stack) or they can be added at the bottom (as a queue).
• Similarly, you can process from the top or the bottom.
• Selective processing view offers a very close experience to a traditional pastestack. You can move items up or down your list, clear them, edit them individually, etc.
• Your list can auto-clear itself (grabbed inspiration from Sequential Paste for this one), or you can set it in a custom path and ignore the timeout. Without a custom path it will go to the workflow's cache folder.
• You have options for after processing your items to restart or do nothing (you can set your items to auto-clear when processed or you can loop through your list). You also have actions like to do right after pasting (insert a line break, comma, space, press tab). 
• In the main menu you can always see your entire list with CMD L on any item. Plus there's a Textview mode (access it with :View) and there's also selective mode which shows individual items with CMD L.
• You can select a list of items and auto split + insert to your stack.

 

There's more features and explanations. Everything is documented over at Github.

 

 

I grabbed some inspiration from Sequential Paste, but also from the paste stack feature from Paste, and the Paste Stack/Queue from CleanClip (which IMO has the best paste stack I've tried). I recently have tried to make more use of Alfred's clipboard management features and I realized I was missing something like this, so I created it. I'm exited to share PasteFlow here and hope many of you also find it useful. 

Edited December 10, 2024 by gloogloo
Pasteflow now supports more than plain text, description and title had to be updated

[gloogloo]

New since shared here (currently on v1.0.2):

• We got a 'copy next' snippet which comes in handy if you are in Alfred's bar and want to use an item from your stack/queue.
• There's also a hotkey & snippet to copy or paste the previous item in your stack/queue in case you want to process in the opposite direction.
• There's a new clipboard history filter, to manually add individual items from Alfred's Clipboard history (last 30 items) to your stack/queue. Press the FN modifier in the main menu "Add from Clipboard" option. More modifier combinations have been added to the readme section that covers this.

• The new clipboard history filter is an implementation based on THIS CODE (which grabs the clipboard items from Alfred's database), but in PasteFlow, we also got some modifier options. With CMD, for example, you can add an item and loop back to the same menu (with the list of clipboard items) to add more to your stack/queue. I just find it convenient and couldn't do something like this directly on Alfred's Clipboard manager.

• I've added a custom hotkey for users to quickly jump to this new Clipboard History filter.

• There's also the new `clipFilter` argument that works for the external trigger to open this view.

There's been a few bug fixes too. You can always grab the "Latest Release" from Github.

[nlpat016]

This is amazing! Thank you. I saw your video and am unsure why this isn't discussed enough. This is so useful. 

 

Is there any limitation that prevents having images as well in the stack (Your video also mentions that it only supports text)

 

Edit: Is there a default keyboard shortcut you'd recommend for daily usage? Perhaps something you found that works conveniently?

Edited September 11, 2024 by nlpat016

[gloogloo]

On 9/10/2024 at 9:11 PM, nlpat016 said:

This is amazing! Thank you. I saw your video and am unsure why this isn't discussed enough. This is so useful. 

 

Is there any limitation that prevents having images as well in the stack (Your video also mentions that it only supports text)

 

Edit: Is there a default keyboard shortcut you'd recommend for daily usage? Perhaps something you found that works conveniently?

@nlpat016 Hi! The limitation for images is mostly due to how Alfred clipboard history works, especially when querying it through environment variables within a workflow. Maybe there could be a hacky workaround, I just haven't had the time to figure this out. Would also love it if it could support rich text, but again, I just need some time (or contributions from someone that knows more than me).

 

I use Karabiner to do a lot of mappings on my keyboard, so it's supper simple. I have Caps Lock + CMD + C to add stuff to my stack. Then I have Caps Lock + CMD + V to paste from it. It basically is like if I had a second clipboard. I do have a bunch of other mappings but those two are so natural because of muscle memory. I also have Selective Mode on Caps Lock + Z and Textview Mode on Caps Lock + X. I manually clear my stack with Caps Lock CMD W. All other mappings are here (just search for Pasteflow)

Edited September 12, 2024 by gloogloo

[Guillaume]

Hi @gloogloo, I discovered this workflow last week : just wanted to thank you for this excellent tool, it will save me hours of work 👌

Edited December 7, 2024 by Guillaume

[cands]

Thanks a lot for making this splendid workflow! I have one feature request, would it be feasible to add some text to the stack manually (just write in plain text in Alfred, more convenient than writing in a document somewhere and copy it from there)? I sometimes find that I would like to merge things from the clipboard but then I also need to input some text manually to make the merged text as desired (could also be handy to edit an item in the clipboard). This could increase the flexibility even more.

Edited November 7, 2024 by cands

[gloogloo]

1 hour ago, cands said:

Thanks a lot for making this splendid workflow! I have one feature request, would it be feasible to add some text to the stack manually (just write in plain text in Alfred, more convenient than writing in a document somewhere and copy it from there)? I sometimes find that I would like to merge things from the clipboard but then I also need to input some text manually to make the merged text as desired (could also be handy to edit an item in the clipboard). This could increase the flexibility even more.

@cands As long as there's already an item in your paste stack, you can edit the entire list with the modifier and add more items directly in there. You just have to start each new item's line with `✈Ͽ ` . Check this sample.

 

I will think about adding an easier/more intuitive option for this.

[odapg]

Thanks a lot for the workflow, it seems very promising!

But unfortunately it doesn't appear to work on Ventura (see Alfred's debbuger output below.) My iMac is unfortunately too old to accept a macos upgrade... Do you think that this could easily be fixed?

 

ERROR: PasteFlow[Script Filter] Code 134: dyld[72949]: Symbol not found: _swift_getTypeByMangledNameInContext2
  Referenced from: <F8B8103A-4A75-31B4-B1FD-33E3587321B0> /Users/thatsme/Library/Application Support/Alfred/Alfred.alfredpreferences/workflows/user.workflow.E5878336-BAA7-4711-BC19-17FEA1944331/scripts/fuzzy (built for macOS 15.0 which is newer than running OS)
  Expected in:     <95DF01EF-FBE8-3763-AB7B-FCD463509547> /usr/lib/swift/libswiftCore.dylib
/Users/thatsme/Library/Caches/com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred/Workflow Scripts/2A85786C-C515-4CEB-91DD-3FDD7C342B3D: line 4: 72949 Abort trap: 6           ./scripts/fuzzy /usr/bin/osascript scripts/main.js

 

 

[cands]

15 hours ago, gloogloo said:

@cands As long as there's already an item in your paste stack, you can edit the entire list with the modifier and add more items directly in there. You just have to start each new item's line with `✈Ͽ ` . Check this sample.

 

I will think about adding an easier/more intuitive option for this.

 

Thanks for explaining this, that is very handy and powerful! Yes, an easier/more intuitive way to add some item would be great (and put it in system clipboard as well can be good for making it also a standalone convenience function). Maybe something like the following could work, would be fast (just a suggestion, could be better ways).

pf :add "add this text as a new item to stack"

 

[gloogloo]

4 hours ago, odapg said:

Thanks a lot for the workflow, it seems very promising!

But unfortunately it doesn't appear to work on Ventura (see Alfred's debbuger output below.) My iMac is unfortunately too old to accept a macos upgrade... Do you think that this could easily be fixed?

 

ERROR: PasteFlow[Script Filter] Code 134: dyld[72949]: Symbol not found: _swift_getTypeByMangledNameInContext2
  Referenced from: <F8B8103A-4A75-31B4-B1FD-33E3587321B0> /Users/thatsme/Library/Application Support/Alfred/Alfred.alfredpreferences/workflows/user.workflow.E5878336-BAA7-4711-BC19-17FEA1944331/scripts/fuzzy (built for macOS 15.0 which is newer than running OS)
  Expected in:     <95DF01EF-FBE8-3763-AB7B-FCD463509547> /usr/lib/swift/libswiftCore.dylib
/Users/thatsme/Library/Caches/com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred/Workflow Scripts/2A85786C-C515-4CEB-91DD-3FDD7C342B3D: line 4: 72949 Abort trap: 6           ./scripts/fuzzy /usr/bin/osascript scripts/main.js

 

 

@odapg Thanks for letting me know. This has to do with the way I'm filtering results of the workflow. I've gone ahead and tried to specifically make this compatible with older Mac versions. Could you possibly go ahead and re-download to try one more time? I've no way of testing so just knowing if it worked or not would be very helpful. 

Edited November 8, 2024 by gloogloo

[odapg]

@gloogloo Yes, it now works! This is fantastic, thank you!

 

I can begin to play with it now!

 

In passing I have noted one tiny thing (probably due to the way Alfred works): if I copy a path to the clipboard (from the terminal for instance), then Alfred recognizes it as a file, so in the clipboard history, the action "PasteFlow | Add to List" is not proposed. 

 

Thanks again!

[gloogloo]

Ok! So I just released v1.1.0 which allows users to add items manually. Thanks @cands for the feature suggestion. 

Here's a short video showing and explaining how this works.

 

v1.1.0

What's New

• Added a snippet for the "bullet" characters required by PasteFlow to recognize separate items when editing in Alfred's text view
• New Manual Input Option: Add items to your stack through the main menu using :Add
  • Use modifier keys for additional options
  • OPT key: Opens Alfred's text view for multi-line input
  • Multiple items can also be added at once using the bullet character from text view
• New Hotkeys (yellow color-coded):
  • Quick add through Alfred's bar
  • Quick add through text view
• There's two new external trigger options for this new "add" option.

Improvements

• The "Edit List" hotkey now works with empty stacks, allowing you to build a stack from scratch directly within Alfred (no need to copy from anywhere else).

[cands]

22 hours ago, gloogloo said:

Ok! So I just released v1.1.0 which allows users to add items manually. Thanks @cands for the feature suggestion. 

Here's a short video showing and explaining how this works.

 

v1.1.0

What's New

• Added a snippet for the "bullet" characters required by PasteFlow to recognize separate items when editing in Alfred's text view
• New Manual Input Option: Add items to your stack through the main menu using :Add
  • Use modifier keys for additional options
  • OPT key: Opens Alfred's text view for multi-line input
  • Multiple items can also be added at once using the bullet character from text view
• New Hotkeys (yellow color-coded):
  • Quick add through Alfred's bar
  • Quick add through text view
• There's two new external trigger options for this new "add" option.

Improvements

• The "Edit List" hotkey now works with empty stacks, allowing you to build a stack from scratch directly within Alfred (no need to copy from anywhere else).

 

Thanks a lot! The new version is even more flexible and powerful, awesome that we easily also can use Alfred's text view for multi-line input (or add multiple items using bullet character).

[gloogloo]

Hey guys I just released PasteFlow v2!

 

This is a BIG update, check THIS VIDEO for a walk-through of the new features. The biggest new feature is that PasteFlow can now pin files and special clipboard data (Rich Text, for example). This update would have not been possible without the help of @vitor, his fantastic Rich Text snippets workflow, and the help he provided when I was trying to restore files to the user's clipboard, so I'm incredibly grateful.

 

Some users have emailed me asking about my personal shortcuts setup for this workflow, so here's this doc with if you are interested.

 

As always, get the latest release of the workflow HERE and check the entire documentation HERE.

 

NEW

• Files can now be added to your paste stack/queue just like regular text
  • Add directly from main menu
  • Add via file action
  • External trigger support maintained
• Flexible File Handling:
  • Add files individually or as grouped items
  • Use split action to separate grouped files into individual items
  • Files can be merged and processed together (only when all files are of the same type)
• Image Preview: View images in your list directly in the :View menu option
• Rich Text Support: New Copy as rich text file action
  • Includes Hotkey and external trigger options
• Clipboard Snapshots! (Experimental): New Add Current Clipboard as Raw Data option
  • Available through Main menu, Hotkey, and external trigger
  • Perfect for storing adjustment layers, brushes, effects, color grades, or different kinds of media.
  • Note: Not all apps support adding or retrieving items from the user's clipboard in the same way. It's suggested you do some testing as restoration behavior may vary depending on the application

 

Limitations & Special Cases

• Rich Text and Raw Clipboard Data have specific restrictions:
  • Cannot be split
  • Cannot be merged or processed with other items (even of same type)
  • Post-paste actions (return, space, comma) do not apply
  • Must be processed individually

 

Enhanced Item Management

• Selective View Improvements:
  • When editing files, rich text, or raw clipboard data, users edit the item's title instead of contents. Useful for identification and organization
• New Clearing Options:
  • Clear single item: CTRL
  • Clear entire list: CTRL + CMD
  • Clear item and delete referenced file: CTRL + OPT
  • Clear entire list and delete all referenced files: CTRL + OPT + CMD

 

New Configuration Options

• Sound Notifications:
  • Configure custom sounds for adding items to list
  • Set sounds for list processing completion
  • You can also assign custom sounds to any external trigger action
• Image Processing:
  • New configuration option to convert TIFF files to JPG or PNG when pinning images from Alfred's clipboard