Utility of the day: Ditto

In most of today's major operating systems, the built-in clipboard has a significant limitation: it can hold only a single item a time. If you cut or copy a second item onto the clipboard, the first item is gone, with no direct way to recover it. Jeff Atwood posted about this issue recently in more depth on his excellent Coding Horror blog.

From the comments on Jeff's post, I learned about an excellent Windows utility that addresses this problem: Ditto. Ditto allows you to use a configurable system-wide hotkey (I'm currently using Ctrl+Alt+v) which brings up a "history browser" with all items that had been recently copied to the clipboard. Ditto automatically takes care of saving clipboard items, so that older items are no longer lost when a new item is copied to the clipboard.

Since installing Ditto on my machine, I've found myself using it more and more. In addition to being able to easily paste items that I know that I had on the clipboard recently, avoiding having to re-copy or retype them, Ditto enables me to in some cases plan ahead and do things more efficiently. For example, say that I have a large text document open, and I want to copy two nearby (but not adjacent) snippets of text from a location near the beginning of the document, and paste each of them to a location near the end of the document. With just basic operating system clipboard functionality, I'd need to:

• Copy item 1;
• Scroll to the end of the document;
• Paste item 1;
• Scroll back to the beginning of the document;
• Copy item 2;
• Scroll back to the end of the document;
• Paste item 2.

With Ditto, I can achieve the same end result more quickly:

• Copy item 1;
• Copy item 2;
• Scroll to the end of the document;
• Paste item 2;
• (Using Ditto) Paste item 1.

Ditto is written in C++, and is free and open-source. You can download it from the Ditto Homepage.