Glipper will make GNOME much more usable

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Dec. 18, 2006

Analysis -- One key feature GNOME has lacked, in comparison to KDE, is a clipboard manager like KDE's Klipper. That's now about to change, thanks to the efforts of a project called "Glipper."

I'm a KDE man. I have been since 1998 when KDE 1.0 first appeared. GNOME was, and is, OK, but I wanted, and still want, a graphical interface that makes it easy for me to get to an operating system's nuts and bolts. In particular, one feature that KDE had, and GNOME didn't, was a multilevel clipboard manager.

When I write stories, or on those rare times when I still write code, I want to be able to not just cut or copy and paste the last item I selected, I want to be able to reference paragraphs and lines that I first put into my editing buffers after I copied more than a dozen other items into the buffer.

Any good programming editor, like SlickEditor 11 makes that easy. The problem with keeping this functionality in an editor is that you usually can't use it to copy text between programs. Or, at most, you can only do when the editor itself is running.

KDE, however, includes that kind of functionality in its desktop applet, Klipper. With Klipper, I can put up to 2,048 entries into my buffer.

Now, 2,048 is a bit much. But, with GNOME, you couldn't even keep one item in a buffer. For example, if I selected some text from a Firefox window and then closed the application, I couldn't paste that material into an OpenOffice document.

That's about to change, though, with the arrival of Glipper. As you could guess from the name, Glipper is a GNOME applet that will have Klipper's functionality.

Glipper depends, by default, on GTK+ 2 and not on the GNOME libraries. This means you should be able to run Glipper on any window manager that supports tray icons.

Glipper, which is at version 0.95, is still a new application. It was only with this version, which was released in mid-November, that GNOME integration was enabled.

KDE's Klipper (top) and GNOME's Glipper (bottom)
It's also still a simple application when compared to Klipper. For example, it has far fewer configuration options than Klipper. Again, that's part of the GNOME philosophy of keeping things simple. Maybe that works for you, but it doesn't work for me.

That said, it still makes GNOME much more usable as far as I'm concerned. The first distribution that will include Glipper appears to be Feisty Fawn Herd 1, which will eventually become Ubuntu 7.04.

Ubuntu users who want to try it without using the barely-alpha Feisty Fawn can do so by downloading it from the Universe file repositories.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Except where otherwise specified, the contents of this site are copyright © 1999-2008 Ziff Davis Enterprise Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis Enterprise is prohibited. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.