PasteFlow: A Paste Stack & Paste Queue for Alfred. Pin & Reuse Text.

[gloogloo]

PASTEFLOW

A Paste Stack & Paste Queue for Alfred. Pin & Reuse Text.

~ Full Documentation ~ | ~ Latest Release ~ | ~ Video Overview ~

 

 

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 text 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.

[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 Wednesday at 03:18 AM 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 Thursday at 08:12 PM by gloogloo