In Windows you can enable a paste buffer which works for text, which keeps a history buffer of your copy/cut operations. Enable it, hit Win-V and you get a popup window of the history, select an item and it comes in.
Massively useful, can’t tell you how many times I use that in a day. Anyhow, I hate to make feature suggestions but it would be lovely if Dorico could support that one day as I constantly bump up against needing multiple pastes. I’d think of it like the Jump bar as a huge quality of life improvement.
Something like Ctrl-Shift-V and you get a popup of your copy/cut history. Might be challenging as you’d need a sensible representation of what is in the buffer, but just the history with numerical labels which I have to remember what is what would be one with me.
It’s an interesting idea, and certainly in theory possible. I think the big challenge is how you make it clear what’s actually in the clipboard. If you select music across, say, 40 staves, how could we show in a sensible fashion what’s actually going on in there? But it’s definitely something for us to think about.
When you paste in lyrics, each syllable removes itself from the pasteboard as you go along, until there’s nothing left. Normally, pasting is non-destructive to the pasteboard contents.
I have requested before that when the pasteboard empties, the pasteboard should return to its ‘full’ state, so that you can repeat the process.
But I can see that this might be difficult to implement – how do you know that a given text selection is ‘lyrics’, etc.
Currently, I use a third-party clipboard manager, and also have a text editor window for temp data.
Whats in the back of my mind is if when a copy/cut is done you also take a bounding box graphic slice of the elements too and cache that in the paste buffer. Depending on the size of that and the size of your buffer display there might be serious compression/scaling. But for example say you copy and entire page of music, the scaled down version (to fit in the buffer) should look like a portrait page of some kind so yeah - might work fine. And in any case it’s up to the person to remember what they did - but the representation just needs to be a thumbnail, I think Windows just gives you the beginning of the string.
In practice I find myself using it two ways. Most of the time I’m keeping current information there - like pasting lyrics as @Derrek and @benwiggy mentioned. The other case I find myself is pasting in something special like a password, UUID or something like that that keeps getting referred to. Even then it’s not something I refer to hours later.
Another example - it would be handy that the first time I used {@sharp@} or any tag it could be still in the paste buffer. I keep finding myself needing it and having to retype it over, but if I just stashed it away then when I need it later it’s right there.