Clipboard

The Clipboard Manager in Supervertaler Workbench captures everything you copy and keeps a persistent history that survives application restarts. Click any item to paste it; trigger a snippet or text conversion to paste the transformed result back to whichever app you came from.

How	Shortcut
Open Clipboard Manager from any application	Ctrl+Alt+C (⌘⌥C on macOS)
Open Clipboard Manager tab manually	Click 📋 Clipboard Manager in the Workbench tab bar

When you summon the Clipboard Manager via Ctrl+Alt+C from another app (e.g. Trados), Workbench automatically sends Ctrl+C in the source app before opening the tab. So you don’t need a separate “copy first” keystroke – the current selection lands at the top of the clipboard history the moment the tab opens.

Three columns

The tab is split into three side-by-side panels:

📝 Text (left) – plain text, rich text, and any other text copied from any application
🖼 Images (middle) – raster images (screenshots, copied graphics, etc.)
📑 Menu (right) – a tree of actions to apply to whatever’s currently on the clipboard: Personal Snippets, Special Characters, Text Conversions, and your QuickLauncher Prompts

Each column has its own count in its header (e.g. Text (37), Images (8)). A draggable splitter lets you resize the three panels.

The column header whose widget currently holds keyboard focus is highlighted in blue with an underline, so it’s always obvious which column the arrow keys are steering.

How clips are captured

The Clipboard Manager monitors the system clipboard in the background. Every time you copy something in any application – a word in Trados, a URL, a code snippet, a screenshot – it is added to the top of the relevant list automatically.

Duplicate copies of identical content are deduplicated (the existing item moves to the top instead of a new entry appearing).

Capacity limits:

Kind	Maximum items
Text	200
Images	50

When a list is full, the oldest item is removed to make room.

Pasting a clip

Click any item in the Text or Images list to paste it. What happens:

The item is placed on the system clipboard.
Workbench is hidden to the system tray.
Ctrl+V is sent to whichever window was active before the Clipboard tab opened.

After pasting, the item is marked as used and appears greyed out. This makes it easy to track which clips you have already inserted in a session.

The third column gives you actions to apply to whatever’s on the clipboard. Expand a category by clicking its arrow or pressing Right with the category focused.

🔄 Refresh button

The Menu column header has a small 🔄 Refresh button on the right. Click it after editing any snippet .md file under <user_data>/snippet_library/ (rename a snippet, change a snippet body, add a new snippet, delete one) or any QuickLauncher prompt .md file in the shared prompt library. Refresh rebuilds the entire Menu tree from disk in one click – before v1.10.47 there was no way to pick up external file edits short of restarting Workbench.

Refresh reloads three sources: the unified prompt library (via UnifiedPromptLibrary.load_all_prompts()), the snippet library (re-scans <user_data>/snippet_library/ with a fresh SnippetLibrary instance), and the Text Conversions table (in-code, but rebuilt for symmetry).

📌 Personal Snippets

Your own text snippets (e.g. phone numbers, email signatures, boilerplate paragraphs). Snippets are loaded from .md files inside your user-data folder – see Personal Snippets for the file format.

Activating a snippet (click or Enter) copies its body to the clipboard and pastes it into the source app via the same hide-and-paste flow used for clipboard clips.

✨ Special Characters

Quick-insert symbols, arrows, primes, dashes, quotes, currency signs, legal symbols, mathematical operators, and bullet characters. Activate one to paste the character into the source app.

🔁 Text Conversions

Transform whatever text is on the clipboard. The conversions are computed against the current clipboard contents – so the typical flow is: select text in another app → Ctrl+Alt+C to open the Clipboard Manager (current selection auto-copies) → navigate to a conversion → Enter to paste the converted text back over your selection.

The shipped defaults

Eleven conversions ship out of the box: Uppercase, Lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case, Single curly quotes, Double curly quotes, Round brackets, Square brackets, Remove soft hyphens (U+00AD), Double quotes → single quotes, Make <b>bold</b>.

Adding your own

Since v1.10.48, every text conversion is a .md file under <user_data>/text_conversion_library/. The folder structure on disk is organisational – move files between folders to re-organise; the parent folder name becomes the conversion’s category.

Drop a new .md file in the right folder, click 🔄 Refresh on the Menu column, and the new conversion appears. Each file declares one conversion via YAML frontmatter at the top, with an optional human-readable notes section below:

---
type: wrap
label: Mark as translator's comment ⟦TC: …⟧
prefix: " ⟦TC: "
suffix: "⟧"
---

Optional notes here. Workbench ignores everything below the closing ---.

The four supported type values cover most needs without arbitrary-code execution:

`type`	What it does	Required fields	Optional fields
`case`	Change case of the whole text	`mode` (one of `upper`, `lower`, `title`, `sentence`, `swap`, `camel`, `snake`, `kebab`)	–
`wrap`	Glue a prefix and suffix around the text	`prefix`, `suffix`	–
`regex_replace`	Find/replace, literal or regex	`find`, `replace`	`regex` (default `true`), `case_sensitive` (default `true`)
`strip_chars`	Remove every occurrence of any listed character	`chars`	–

Common optional metadata:

label – the display label shown in the Menu. Defaults to the filename stem if omitted (useful when the label contains characters that can’t be in filenames, like : or ").
category – overrides the folder-derived category. Set to an empty string to surface the conversion at the top level.
enabled – defaults to true. Set to false to hide without deleting (useful for project-specific conversions you might want back later).

Concrete examples

A wrap conversion for HTML emphasis:

---
type: wrap
label: HTML <em>
prefix: <em>
suffix: </em>
---

A strip-chars conversion that removes several invisible characters in one go (uses YAML’s \u escape inside double quotes):

---
type: strip_chars
label: Strip invisible spaces (NBSP + figure space + narrow NBSP)
chars: "   "
---

A regex find/replace for em-dash-to-en-dash:

---
type: regex_replace
label: "Em dash (—) → en dash (–)"
find: "—"
replace: "–"
regex: false
---

A regex find/replace using capture groups for UK → US “-our” → “-or” endings:

---
type: regex_replace
label: "UK → US: drop the 'u' from -our endings"
find: "([Cc]olo|[Ff]avo|[Hh]ono|[Ll]abo|[Nn]eighbo|[Bb]ehavio|[Ff]lavo|[Oo]do|[Rr]umo)u(r)"
replace: "\\1\\2"
regex: true
---

(Note the doubled backslashes in replace – \\1 in YAML is needed to produce \1 in the actual regex replacement string.)

Things that DON’T work (and why)

The four type values are deliberately limited – no arbitrary Python execution from user-data files, no shell commands, no network calls. If you have a transformation that genuinely needs Python (multi-step pipelines that produce intermediate state, calls to an external library, etc.), open a GitHub issue describing the use case and we’ll consider adding a python_file type with appropriate safeguards.

Broken conversions (invalid type, bad regex, missing required field) are silently skipped on load and logged to the Workbench log – the clipboard flow never breaks on a typo. Fix the file, click 🔄 Refresh, and the conversion comes back.

💬 QuickLauncher Prompts

Your custom AI prompts from the Prompt Manager, grouped by folder. Activating a prompt copies its body to the clipboard.

Deleting clips

Single item – right-click any entry in the Text or Images list and choose 🗑 Delete, or select it and press the Delete key.

All clips – click Clear all in the top-right corner of the Clipboard tab, or right-click any entry and choose Clear all. This removes the entire history from both the Text and Images lists and cannot be undone. (The Menu column is unaffected – it’s not history.)

Key	Action
Up / Down	Move through items in the focused column
Right	Move focus rightwards (Text → Images → Menu)
Left	Move focus leftwards (Menu → Images → Text)
Right on a Menu category	Expand the category
Left on an expanded Menu category	Collapse it
Enter	Paste the selected item / activate the selected action
Delete	Remove the selected clip from history (Text / Images lists only)
Esc	Hide Workbench to the system tray (when focus isn’t in a text input)

Empty state

When a column contains no clips, a centred placeholder message is shown:

Text column: No text yet – copy any text to start
Image column: No images yet – copy any image to start

Persistence

The full clip history is stored in your user data folder in a shared SQLite database. Items are available the next time you open Supervertaler Workbench.