Feature: Auto Copy / Auto Action

Would it be easier to put a hashtag in front of them to allow for a keyword search for hidden settings?

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A search for “defaults write” ought to suffice.

This calls for a clipboard manager app

Why don’t you use Bettertouchtool?
It’s got a built-in clipboard manager and does lots of other things too, like popclip!
A real utility to have in your Mac, I think, in addition to popclip.
And it lets you copy and paste with text selection.


Pourquoi n’utilisez-vous pas Bettertouchtool ?
Il a un gestionnaire de presse-papier intégré et permet de nombreuses choses aussi comme popclip !
Un vrai utilitaire à avoir dans son mac, je pense, en plus de popclip.
Et il permet d’avoir le copié-collé avec la selection de text.

Been using BTT for almost seven years and agree it’s a great utility. The key thing for me about PopClip is how it is triggered. Clicking, and clicking and draging, are irreducible actions within the UI unless you go full voice control, which is currently way more cumbersome. BBT doesn’t have click and drag as a trigger which PopClip does, and brings lots more functionality to that specific action. While this may seem like a very fine point to be making and perhaps it is a fine point, I’m personally at a place where each action and even the particulars of how each action is taken make a difference to me. This could well be an outliers view and it’s fine if that’s the case.

To stretch this out even thinner, I once bought a screen dimming app that had you put the cursor on the app icon in the menubar and then, by doing a two-finger scrolling gesture, would raise and lower the screen brightness. Even though I wasn’t sure I’d use it much (and I haven’t), the calibration of the amount of finger movement to brightness change was done so well that I bought it anyway. This is also the case with the utility called Swish, which gives window resizing and relocating options when you put the cursor in the toolbar of the active window and swipe in some direction. Its implementation of gesture control is finer and more reliable than Keyboard Maestro’s or BTT’s, so I now use it rather than those two that I had been using up to that point.

The soapbox I’m now on is that there has been (IMO) relatively little attention paid to the kinesthetics of the UI. There are some app developers aware of this and work on this aspect of UI as there are some users who are keenly aware of and highly appreciate this “touchyness” aspect of UI.

Again, PopClip’s cornered the market, so to speak, when it comes to enhancing the click and drag gesture, and it’s from there that I requested Nick to put even more into it, which he has declined, and that’s ok.

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Postscript

Some very clever someone worked this out as a Keyboard Maestro macro. Here are the actions:

Here’s the post: Can I Automatically Copy a Text in Selected? - Questions & Suggestions - Keyboard Maestro Discourse

The point is that now that I have it, I find it quite a useful shortcut.

As you pointed out, there is an initial cognitive overhead of remembering that that copy is happening with each selection until it’s remembered. I suppose the action could be toggled on/off within the actions list if it ever makes the grade.

Like all things, there are no free lunches.

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I have (I believe) a slightly different take on the auto-action feature request. Now, it could fall into the category of different modes, which I know @nick doesn’t love - but it doesn’t have to be. :sweat_smile:

The thing is, I only trigger PopClip via hotkey - and my idea is:

  • When you trigger PopClip with a hotkey (to avoid having different modes in options),
  • and you select actions with the arrow keys,
  • auto-perform the action without hitting Enter (after a slight delay, which might be configurable).

The use case for this, is that I’d like to not have to move my hand over to the mouse or the Enter key. :slightly_smiling_face:

Another option, could be that this only happens if you hold a modifier and move with the arrows. And then it fires immediately when you release the modifier.

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