On 2/9/2012 4:46 PM, wavesource wrote:

Hi

I was tweaking my shorthand just now, and was looking at the {{-}}
tokens that are used to populate the shorthand variables with
descriptors.

Would it be possible at all to have tokens automatically populated
from system clipboard? eg. {{-clipboard}} or {{-paste}}.

You have a good idea here! I can see how automatically including
clipboard text can come in handy.

I have constructed quite a tree of extremely useful shorthand
snippets which I use pretty much exclusively over keyboard shortcuts,
save line returns and non-breaking white space tags/entities etc. but
if there was the ability to also use the last copied item on the
clipboard as an automatically injected constant into such tokens in a
shorthand snippet, then that would be dreamy.

For example, one snippet that is useful for trudging through
client's HTML requirements I use is:

@begin-s "aha" [fields=1, movecursor=1]

<a href="http://{{-url|URL|URL}}">{{-}}</a>

@end-s "aha"

A quick note about {{-}} before I forget... although "{{-}}" works as a
field, I'd recommend always including a field name for future
compatibility. Even if it's something generic like {{-content}}

('aha' is my own nomenclature for 'a' (anchor) 'h' (requires
http://) 'a' (assymetrical - ie. the client likes the links to not
display "http://" in the visible text, and all the text they send me
doesn't have "http://" in the URLs, so I have to add these. I invoke
'aha' as shorthand after cutting the URL out of their text, which
gives me the tag preprended with the "http://" but leaves the actual
visible text to be pasted clean, so I then tab through and paste the
URL in and the job's done.

Aha! Sounds like you're making great use of Shorthand. Nice!

If the copied string from the clipboard could be injected
automatically when the shorthand tag renders to the page in the
appropriate fields, then one would be able to convert such things in
a simple copy/type shorthand code/hit Ctrl-J operation.

I know one could construct regex to probably attempt to grapple with
this, but sometimes it's a bit too big of a gun to pull out every
time you want to clean up some code.

There's something waiting for you in the TreeHouse and it just might
accept something like the following :)

 <a href="http://{{-url|URL|URL|opt_clipboardtext}}">{{-content}}</a>

Having to include opt_clipboardtext option is probably more verbose than
you wanted, but let's explore usage scenarios a bit first. Also, this
adds a more consistent way of including clipboard text in templates and
snippets as well.

One of the possible issues though is that you'd probably have to create
a Shorthand that includes clipboard text and one that doesn't. At least
in my case, I'm likely to forget that I had copied a big block of text
ten minutes ago. Without a non-clipboard version of a Shorthand, I'd
have to blank out the clipboard.

Thanks for your great work, as usual!

Oh I appreciate it. It's nice to get feedback and some encouraging words
now and then :)

Have fun!

Chami

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