Test version of Diodon with its new Zeitgeist integration has been out for a while. In the first test version there was only a limited version of Unity Diodon Scope available. We have been working on improving this integration to bring the Unity Scope to its full potential. In this post do I want to describe what new features have been integrated and how you can testrun those before we hopefully release them soon.

When the Unity Scope (resp. Lens back then) has been introduced in Diodon version 0.4.0 it was fairly limited and it was only possible to search in the recent clipboard history which had a limit of 100 items. With the recent change of Zeitgeist and infinitive clipboard history this limit has been removed and makes the Unity Scope more powerful itself.

But there is more like the new filters for category (Text, Files, Images) or time when a clipboard item has been copied.

With this filter and text search available you hopefully find any item you have copied before. There is also a preview available when you click on a clipboard item. The preview will show you the full content of the item (especially helpful when verifying a longer piece of text) with additional information what application the item has been copied from and the date copied.

You can open Unity Diodon Scope with the hotkey <Super>b or simply by pressing the clip icon on the right hand side on the dash and start search your clipboard history.

The Diodon Scope used to be an plugin which caused some issues as Smart Scopes service was not able to start and stop it itself. We therefore have now turned the scope into its own service as it should be which also gives the advantage that the scope can be closed when not needed to safe resources, but started as soon as requested.

This brought about some changes in the packages to install it – we have removed the package diodon-plugins (will be added again as soon as we have other plugins available again) and added a new package unity-scope-diodon. As soon as you have installed this package and logged in and out again the scope will be available. No need to activate it as before.

If you are interested and want to test it use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:diodon-team/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install diodon unity-scope-diodon

Let us know what you think and report a bug if you find any glitches or have suggestion to improve it.

I herewith also want to thank all translators who took the time to update the Diodon translations. Great work. There are still some translations which are not quite up-to-date yet. Have a look whether you can help out.