I wonder why neither major desktop OS is doing anything fancy with the clipboard. Office used to, but that seems to have stopped--at least automatically, or as something they signal. To be frank, I did find the corner of my screen yelling at me a bit distracting, but it could be useful from time to time.

is there really no payoff for either company to dress it up a little? Provide a history, or a viewer, or something perfectly obvious I'm not thinking about?

I think the problem was that that advanced clipboards seemed to cause major stability problems. Maybe someone has tackled that. Desktop publishing programs seem to manage them though - call them work areas or whatever.

What's intrinsic in a clipboard that brings instability along with? Memory issues?

I love CuteClips3. That's what I use for my clipboard manager. I could use Alfred - which does a lot of other things, but I got CuteClips before I got Alfred.

I'll have to look at both of those.

Right now I'm using Sublime as a text editor--not for code yet, just docs, and so far, fine. The opening closing quotes thing was a bit startling.

I'm a little confused by the documentation on the web about Lion. If I look up how to uninstall an app, either they're wrong, or my system is weird. Or they're writing about some halcyon time in the future and sending their documents back to July 2012.

When I do the hold-to-jiggle, only the one app I bought in the App Store has an x. Of the first three articles I clicked on about uninstalling only one mentioned this was an option, and it didn't tell you what to do in this case.

What is the terrain actually like out there? Is everyone magically using all App Store apps? Or not uninstalling? Or is it the fourth document that tells them "Oh, just delete it from Applications like before." I mean, it didn't take me long to try it, but why do the help pages not mention it? Why do most of the illustrations show all App Store apps? Is this representative and helpful?

I don't know. Part of it is just that you can fill up the clipboards fast when you have a lot of them (DTP save their "work areas" to disk and they are part of the document. In office I often find that even one item on the office clipboard rather than the windows clipboard can cause a crash. That is XP so maybe no longer a problem in 7. Seems like they would have fixed that before they left XP if it was easy.

And I note that both the 3rd party clipboard managers for the Mac. Windows memory management is maybe a bit harder? Or was at any rate?

There are a lot of clipboard managers for Windows too. I'm assuming LeN's recommending her platform, not the entire market.

And the term "fill the clipboard" can be worked around numerous ways. You can fill a clipboard with one item, if filling is ever a problem, or you can cap the size or number of items, or page, or whatever.

yes. my recommendation is for the mac. I really like it. read the documentation (which is short) and don't try to cut and paste a whole dissertation, and you will get out alive.

I used to have a perfectly functional multi clipboard on Windows 95. I think that it comes down to simplicity for the average user.