Hi, my great reader! This post describes one of the small gotchas that you’ve probably gotten used to while working with computers.
One of the must-have apps is a clipboard manager. I used ClipIt on Linux, and now I’m using ClipMenu on OS X. I tried a couple of others, but this app is most suitable for me. Since I also use the KeePassX password manager and copy logins & passwords to the browser, a feature that would allow the clipboard manager to skip that data is absolutely necessary. Luckily, ClipMenu allows you to specify apps which data it will ignore:
It worked… almost every time. However, sometimes a password was captured. I thought there could be a bug in the program, but then found the cause. If you look once more on the screenshot, there is “Time interval to observe the clipboard:” slider set to “1 sec.”. It means that the app checks for new content once a second. Thus, the reason a password sometimes was sometimes found in the app is that I copied it and switched to the browser in less than a second. It then thought the string came from the browser, which is wrong.
There are two solutions here:
Deliberately use a small one-second delay between switching to the browser. This is hard for a keyboard junkie, such as me.
Decrease the monitoring time interval.
That’s it. Happy clipboarding!