Diodon version 1.1.0 is shaping up very nicely and is hopefully soon going to be released after some last polishing.
Before this is gonna happen I want to introduce you to two new default settings which further make Diodon a slick and fast utility with as less footprint as possibly but still keeping options available for more advanced users. But let me elaborate.
Disabling of primary selection support by default
Primary selection support has been added to Diodon since its very first version. What this features does is when a certain text is selected in any editor it will automatically be added to the clipboard history and then it is accessible from the Diodon indicator or unity scope to paste at any time. This is cool especially when you frequently just select and paste with a middle mouse click in a different editor. As a primary selection can also be pasted with the shortcut <Shift>Insert when such support is enabled, Diodon is able to instant paste in applications which do not support <Ctrl>V for paste (e.g. Gnome Terminal).
However this feature also brings some disadvantages with it. First of all it floods the clipboard history with quite some items and especially if you do not use the select/paste feature at all. This distracts you from finding the items you actually want to paste. Furthermore does enabling of this feature potentially drains your battery quicker in case you are not connected directly to a power source.
Advantages and disadvantages indicate that primary selection support is an advanced feature. We therefore have decided to disable it by default but of course you are still able to enable it again in the Diodon preferences.
Not adding images to clipboard history by default
In versions before 1.1.0 Diodon added images to the clipboard history at all times. Those images can for instance be copied by your browser to the clipboard when you right click on an image and choose “Copy image”. Or also when you create a print screen and choose “Copy to clipboard”.
Nice but why do you want to disable this you might ask? Well unfortunately images are in general much bigger than just some text. This has an impact on the memory consumption of Diodon. So Diodon needs to copy the image to the memory and then create previews for it so you can easily identify it when you paste it. There are also some circumstances where image applications like Gimp constantly copy images to the clipboard which gives Diodon a lot of work to do increasing therefore CPU usage – and actually in most cases the many pictures copied by Gimp you do not really want to add to your clipboard history.
As this feature is not so often used and there is a possibility to decrease the memory footprint of Diodon, it is now disabled by default so images won’t be added to the clipboard history automatically. There is though an option available in Diodon preferences where you can enable it again.
No worries though. Disabling “Add images to clipboard history” won’t delete any image items from the history which have been copied previously. Such will always be available to be pasted for you till you decide to clear them from your history. That also means that you can temporarily enable/disable the feature whenever you need to without loosing any items copied already.
Want to test run it?
Convinced and want to test run it? You can do this with the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:diodon-team/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install diodon unity-scope-diodon
Remember though that this is still a test version which might have issues. If you find any please report them. And also let us know what you think about this change in the comments section below.
