Clipboard Manager
The Clipboard Manager in Supervertaler Workbench captures everything you copy and keeps a persistent history that survives application restarts. Click any item to paste it; trigger a snippet or text conversion to paste the transformed result back to whichever app you came from.
Open Clipboard Manager from any application
Ctrl+Alt+C (⌘⌥C on macOS)
Open Clipboard Manager tab manually
Click 📋 Clipboard Manager in the Workbench tab bar
When you summon the Clipboard Manager via Ctrl+Alt+C from another app (e.g. Trados), Workbench automatically sends Ctrl+C in the source app before opening the tab. So you don't need a separate "copy first" keystroke – the current selection lands at the top of the clipboard history the moment the tab opens.
:::note The tab was renamed from "📋 Clipboard" to "📋 Clipboard Manager" in v1.10.47 to match what the widget actually does – it has been more than a clipboard history for several versions (Snippets, Text Conversions, QuickLauncher Prompts, plus the clipboard history columns). :::
Three columns
The tab is split into three side-by-side panels:
📝 Text (left) – plain text, rich text, and any other text copied from any application
🖼 Images (middle) – raster images (screenshots, copied graphics, etc.)
📑 Menu (right) – a tree of actions to apply to whatever's currently on the clipboard: Personal Snippets, Special Characters, Text Conversions, and your QuickLauncher Prompts
Each column has its own count in its header (e.g. Text (37), Images (8)). A draggable splitter lets you resize the three panels.
The column header whose widget currently holds keyboard focus is highlighted in blue with an underline, so it's always obvious which column the arrow keys are steering.
How clips are captured
The Clipboard Manager monitors the system clipboard in the background. Every time you copy something in any application – a word in Trados, a URL, a code snippet, a screenshot – it is added to the top of the relevant list automatically.
Duplicate copies of identical content are deduplicated (the existing item moves to the top instead of a new entry appearing).
Capacity limits:
Text
200
Images
50
When a list is full, the oldest item is removed to make room.
Pasting a clip
Click any item in the Text or Images list to paste it. What happens:
The item is placed on the system clipboard.
Workbench is hidden to the system tray.
Ctrl+Vis sent to whichever window was active before the Clipboard tab opened.
After pasting, the item is marked as used and appears greyed out. This makes it easy to track which clips you have already inserted in a session.
:::note Latest clip is highlighted on open. Every time you switch to the Clipboard tab, the most recent text clip (top of the list) is selected automatically – press Enter to paste it without touching the mouse. If you'd rather paste an older clip, arrow up/down to it first. :::
The Menu column
The third column gives you actions to apply to whatever's on the clipboard. Expand a category by clicking its arrow or pressing Right with the category focused.
🔄 Refresh button
The Menu column header has a small 🔄 Refresh button on the right. Click it after editing any snippet .md file under <user_data>/snippet_library/ (rename a snippet, change a snippet body, add a new snippet, delete one) or any QuickLauncher prompt .md file in the shared prompt library. Refresh rebuilds the entire Menu tree from disk in one click – before v1.10.47 there was no way to pick up external file edits short of restarting Workbench.
Refresh reloads three sources: the unified prompt library (via UnifiedPromptLibrary.load_all_prompts()), the snippet library (re-scans <user_data>/snippet_library/ with a fresh SnippetLibrary instance), and the Text Conversions table (in-code, but rebuilt for symmetry).
📌 Personal Snippets
Your own text snippets (e.g. phone numbers, email signatures, boilerplate paragraphs). Snippets are loaded from .md files inside your user-data folder – see Personal Snippets for the file format.
Activating a snippet (click or Enter) copies its body to the clipboard and pastes it into the source app via the same hide-and-paste flow used for clipboard clips.
✨ Special Characters
Quick-insert symbols, arrows, primes, dashes, quotes, currency signs, legal symbols, mathematical operators, and bullet characters. Activate one to paste the character into the source app.
🔁 Text Conversions
Transform whatever text is on the clipboard. The conversions are computed against the current clipboard contents – so the typical flow is: select text in another app → Ctrl+Alt+C to open the Clipboard Manager (current selection auto-copies) → navigate to a conversion → Enter to paste the converted text back over your selection.
The shipped defaults
Eleven conversions ship out of the box: Uppercase, Lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case, Single curly quotes, Double curly quotes, Round brackets, Square brackets, Remove soft hyphens (U+00AD), Double quotes → single quotes, Make <b>bold</b>.
Adding your own
Since v1.10.48, every text conversion is a .md file under <user_data>/text_conversion_library/. The folder structure on disk is organisational – move files between folders to re-organise; the parent folder name becomes the conversion's category.
Drop a new .md file in the right folder, click 🔄 Refresh on the Menu column, and the new conversion appears. Each file declares one conversion via YAML frontmatter at the top, with an optional human-readable notes section below:
The four supported type values cover most needs without arbitrary-code execution:
type
What it does
Required fields
Optional fields
case
Change case of the whole text
mode (one of upper, lower, title, sentence, swap, camel, snake, kebab)
–
wrap
Glue a prefix and suffix around the text
prefix, suffix
–
regex_replace
Find/replace, literal or regex
find, replace
regex (default true), case_sensitive (default true)
strip_chars
Remove every occurrence of any listed character
chars
–
Common optional metadata:
label– the display label shown in the Menu. Defaults to the filename stem if omitted (useful when the label contains characters that can't be in filenames, like:or").category– overrides the folder-derived category. Set to an empty string to surface the conversion at the top level.enabled– defaults totrue. Set tofalseto hide without deleting (useful for project-specific conversions you might want back later).
Concrete examples
A wrap conversion for HTML emphasis:
A strip-chars conversion that removes several invisible characters in one go (uses YAML's \u escape inside double quotes):
A regex find/replace for em-dash-to-en-dash:
A regex find/replace using capture groups for UK → US "-our" → "-or" endings:
(Note the doubled backslashes in replace – \\1 in YAML is needed to produce \1 in the actual regex replacement string.)
Things that DON'T work (and why)
The four type values are deliberately limited – no arbitrary Python execution from user-data files, no shell commands, no network calls. If you have a transformation that genuinely needs Python (multi-step pipelines that produce intermediate state, calls to an external library, etc.), open a GitHub issue describing the use case and we'll consider adding a python_file type with appropriate safeguards.
Broken conversions (invalid type, bad regex, missing required field) are silently skipped on load and logged to the Workbench log – the clipboard flow never breaks on a typo. Fix the file, click 🔄 Refresh, and the conversion comes back.
💬 QuickLauncher Prompts
Your custom AI prompts from the Prompt Manager, grouped by folder. Activating a prompt copies its body to the clipboard.
Deleting clips
Single item – right-click any entry in the Text or Images list and choose 🗑 Delete, or select it and press the Delete key.
All clips – click Clear all in the top-right corner of the Clipboard tab, or right-click any entry and choose Clear all. This removes the entire history from both the Text and Images lists and cannot be undone. (The Menu column is unaffected – it's not history.)
Keyboard navigation
Up / Down
Move through items in the focused column
Right
Move focus rightwards (Text → Images → Menu)
Left
Move focus leftwards (Menu → Images → Text)
Right on a Menu category
Expand the category
Left on an expanded Menu category
Collapse it
Enter
Paste the selected item / activate the selected action
Delete
Remove the selected clip from history (Text / Images lists only)
Esc
Hide Workbench to the system tray (when focus isn't in a text input)
Empty state
When a column contains no clips, a centred placeholder message is shown:
Text column: No text yet – copy any text to start
Image column: No images yet – copy any image to start
Persistence
The full clip history is stored in your user data folder in a shared SQLite database. Items are available the next time you open Supervertaler Workbench.
Related pages
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