Clipboard history and snippets

Clipboard history

Windows only keeps the last thing you copied. Dial keeps the last several, and they live on the Control key rather than in a category:

• Move through what you have copied: Control + turn dial
• Copy that entry back to the clipboard: Control + press dial
• Paste it where your cursor is: Control + press dial twice

Control is deliberate. It is the key your hand already associates with copying and pasting, and it means the history is one gesture away from wherever you are. You do not have to leave the sentence you are typing to reach it.

Entries are announced newest first, shortened to about sixty characters so the list stays quick to move through. The whole entry is what gets copied, not the shortened version you hear.

Why one press copies and two press paste

Pressing once copies. Pressing twice quickly copies and then pastes, so the second press saves you reaching for Control + V.

It is that way round on purpose. Elsewhere Dial holds a press back for a third of a second to see whether a second one is coming, because there the two presses mean opposite things: opening a website or copying its address, playing a station or setting a sleep timer. Copy and paste are not opposites. The copy has to have happened for there to be anything to paste, copying twice costs nothing, and pasting when you only meant to copy would type into your document uninvited. So the copy goes the instant you press, and the paste follows only if you ask again.

What does wait is Dial telling you it copied. You hear a short tick as you press, and "Copied" and the entry name follow a third of a second later, or not at all if you press again, in which case you just hear "Pasted". Otherwise a double press means hearing "Copied" chopped off half way through by "Pasted", which is two announcements for one thing you meant to do. The copying itself still happens the moment you press, so nothing is riding on that wait.

Pasting only happens where text can actually go. If your cursor is not in a text field, Dial says "Not a text field, so nothing was pasted" and leaves the entry on your clipboard, so the press is never wasted and never lands somewhere you did not expect.

How long it is kept for, and where

That is your choice, and there are three answers. Open NVDA's settings, choose the Dial category, go to the Add-on Settings tab, and look for Clipboard history:

• Do not keep a clipboard history. Nothing is recorded, and Control and the dial go back to doing whatever they did before.
• Keep it until NVDA restarts. The history is in memory only, nothing you copy ends up in a file, and closing NVDA empties it. This is what the add-on has always done and it is still what you get on a fresh install.
• Keep it after NVDA restarts, saved to disk. The history is still there next time you start NVDA.

If you choose to save it, the history goes in a file in your NVDA configuration folder, and Windows encrypts it for you so that only your Windows account can read it. Copying that file to another computer, or to another account on this one, gets nobody anything: it cannot be decrypted there, so a synced or backed-up copy of it is not a way in.

Being honest about what that does not cover: it is your Windows account that holds the key, so a program already running as you could ask Windows to decrypt the file, exactly as Dial does. Encryption is not a substitute for the rule below about password managers, which is why that rule applies whichever of the three you choose.

Copies made by password managers are ignored, in all three settings. Applications like KeePass mark a copied password with a "do not record this" flag, and Dial checks for that flag before recording anything, so a password never reaches the history in the first place and cannot reach the file either.

Pictures and copied files are ignored too. Only text is remembered, and anything over about a megabyte is skipped rather than cut short.

How much is kept

Number of copies to remember is 5 to 50, normally 10, and it applies whichever setting you choose. Turning past the oldest entry is how you know you have reached the end.

Forget saved copies after this many days is 1 to 90, normally 7, and it appears only when you have chosen to save the history. Copies older than that are dropped the next time you use the dial, so nothing you copied a fortnight ago is still sitting in the file. A history that goes when NVDA restarts has no age worth capping, which is why the setting is not there for it.

The two work together rather than one replacing the other. The number of copies is what keeps the ring short enough to turn through; the number of days is what stops old copies lingering.

Clearing it

Keep turning past the oldest entry and you reach Clear clipboard history. Pressing it asks you to confirm, then forgets everything Dial has remembered, and deletes the saved file if you had one. It does not touch the Windows clipboard itself, so whatever you copied last can still be pasted. The question starts on No, so pressing Enter on it cancels.

Two other things delete that file: turning the history off, and going back to keeping it only until NVDA restarts. The history never travels either, so it is not included in an export.

Removing the add-on does not delete it, and that is NVDA's doing rather than a choice Dial makes: NVDA leaves its configuration folder alone when an add-on is removed, which is the same reason your categories survive reinstalling. If you want the file gone, clear the history first.

Snippets

A snippet is text you want on tap: your email address, a postal address, a standard reply you send often. Launching a snippet copies it to the clipboard, exactly like launching a clipboard history entry.

Snippets differ from the history in one important way: they are text you chose to keep, rather than a record of what you happened to copy. They live in your normal categories, they always survive restarting NVDA whatever the clipboard setting says, and they are included in an export, which the history never is.

To make one, add an item in the usual way and set its type to Snippet. Instead of a target you get a multi-line text box, so a snippet can be several lines long. A fresh install comes with a Snippets category holding two examples to replace.