Enhance clipping shortcut Ctrl+F12

The current shortcut Ctrl+F12 requests to select some text. Otherwise an empty note is created. I suggest to drop this requirement. The window title is always there and can be used to create a new note. Applications like FF and TB should be supported for grabing the url. This suggestion avoids problems that similar suggestions have. For example the current clipping feature always creates a new note, whereas many times i want to add a title/url combination to an existing note. Also it avoids the problem, that the main window automatically pop's up. Another advantage is the push model. With just two little modifications existing functionality can be extended to work much more efficient. Imo the suggestion also supersedes http://roadmap.cintanotes.com/topic/115035-grab-url-and-window-title-to-store-inside-notes-text/ and http://roadmap.cintanotes.com/topic/13907-clip-text-into-currently-edited-note/.

When the option (2) is turned off i will still be able to easily create a new note. Copy to the clipboard using Ctrl+F12, create a new note using Shift+Ctrl+F12 and paste the content using Ctrl+V. People that don't like this, can still leave the option turned on and they will have the standard behaviour as it always was with CN. People won't even notice the new enhancements.

 Hi Thomas,

I have a couple of questions:

1)  If I understand correctly. you suggest to drop note clipping on Ctrl+F12 and replace it with just copying to clipboard, while introducing an option to enable the old behavior. Wouldn't it be more convenient to just add another shortcut? The number of different options is growing very fast, and I don't want future CN users to spend lots of time configuring the software.

2) How CintaNotes can know that no text is selected without first trying to copy it to clipboard and timing out? How can the URL be obtained without it being placed into clipboard by the application on (simulated by CN) Ctrl+C - and this happens only if some text is selected?

The only other way to get the URL is via emulating special keystrokes like Ctrl+L, and that will require large refactoring, and also introduce noticeable lag.

3) "Otherwise an empty note is created." - the note is not completely empty, its title is taken from the window title.

1a. Wouldn't it be more convenient to just add another shortcut?

>>Not really. How many system-wide shortcuts do we want to define?

1b. The number of different options is growing very fast, and I don't want future CN users to spend lots of time configuring the software.

>>Of course the best way is to have an optimal setup for all users. I doubt, this will ever happen ;) In the end you'll need some concept of handling individualization of the environment. How about adding the option to the settings file only? Documenting the settings in the ini file (some time in the future) would allow advanced users to tweak CN the way they like best without offering to many options in the GUI.

2a. How CintaNotes can know that no text is selected without first trying to copy it to clipboard and timing out?

>>I don't know. Isn't it possible to check if any text of the active control is selected before copying it to the clipboard?

2b. How can the URL be obtained without it being placed into clipboard by the application on (simulated by CN) Ctrl+C - and this happens only if some text is selected?

>>Sorry Alex, i have no knowledge on how CN manages this anyway. I thought you would use some special binding for each supported browser and getting the URL by directly refering to the URL control. How does CN handle this right now? Does it take two steps? One for the selected text, the other for the URL?

3) "Otherwise an empty note is created." - the note is not completely empty, its title is taken from the window title.

>>This might depend on the settings (file). If i don't select any text and press Ctrl+F12 it will create an empty note.

While doing researches on how a browser url can be retrieved using API calls i became aware of some firefox/thunderbird addons that can handle the job :) I now use "AutoCopy" which is available for ff and tb. "Copy Fixer" is also nice, but only available for ff. ...hm, while editing the post i selected a word to delete by using a double-click. It became automatically copied to the clipboard. This was not intended, but a side-effect of the AutoCopy extension. I will have to gain more experience with them the next couple of days.Stay tuned ;)