FIXED: Fixed a bug that would cause use count to be unnecessarily incremented in some situations,. e.g. when capturing duplicate clips.

This release fixes important bugs. Please download and install this release, especially if you are using version 1.1.1 (published February 21).

FIXED: A significant bug that would cause loss of certain clips when Echo performed database maintenance. This bug affected only certain installations, but was quite severe when it occurred.

FIXED: Minor change to allow Echo to paste clips into certain applications with non-standard windows that do not automatically regain focus (e.g. Stickes). Echo should now be able to paste clips into such applications, but only if Echo runs minimized and only if it is activated by the activation hotkey (not with the mouse).

Keyboard shortcut to toggle the option to keep Echo always on top of other windows: Ctrl+Y.

Global hotkey to connect/disconnect from clipboard: Shift+Win+]. Disabled by default.

If you typically keep Echo open and on-top of other windows (rather than hidden in the tray), you may like the new option at Preferences -> Pasting clips -> FinalWindowAction. If you set it to waRestore, Echo will restore itself after it has minimized in order to paste the clip into another application.

Related to the above, if choose to keep Echo always on top of other windows, Echo will not longer minimize when you switch to another application, even if the MinimizeOnDeactivate option is enabled. It just makes sense this way.

There is now an option to tell Echo not to capture clips copied from itself – for example, when you copy text in the clip editor. Preferences -> Capturing clips -> IgnoreFromSelf.

New action was added in the Database Maintenance dialog: Refresh clip data. Use it after you have increased or decreased the MaxDispTextSize setting, so that Echo will update the database to match this setting. This takes quite a long time, because Echo must load and examine every clip. Totally optional; it just makes the database fully consistent with that important setting.

ADDED: Keyboard shortcut to toggle the option to keep Echo always on top of other windows: Ctrl+Y.

ADDED: Global hotkey to connect/disconnect from clipboard. By default this hotkey is disabled. The default hotkey is Shift+Win+] and it can be changed in Preferences -> Keyboard ->ConnectHotkeyKey and ConnectHotkeyModifier. To enable the hotkey, set UseConnectHotkey to True.

ADDED: An option to control what happens after Echo hides itself and pastes a clip into the active window: Preferences -> Pasting clips -> FinalWindowAction. By default, Echo behaves as it had before: hides itself and does nothing. The other available setting is waRestore: Echo will hide, paste the clip and restore itself (but it will not regain focus). The new option is useful if you want to keep Echo on top of all other windows, since in that case you probably don’t want Echo to hide and stay hidden.

ADDED: In the external clip editor, a prompt is now displayed if you close the editor without saving the changes. The prompt can be disabled directly in the dialog box, or under Preferences -> Prompting -> BeforeClosingEditor.

ADDED: An option to ignore clips if they were copied from within Echo itself, for example in the clip editor. This option is disabled by default, so Echo will capture clips from itself. To change this setting: Preferences -> Capturing clips -> IgnoreFromSelf and set this value to True.

ADDED: A new action was added in the “Maintain” section of the Database Maintenance dialog:

• Refresh clip data: this action refreshes the “display text” for all clips in the database, as well as the part of each clip that gets searched. You may want to use this action after you have made a change to the setting in Preferences -> Database -> MaxDispTextSize. This setting controls how much of each clip is displayed and searched. (For very long clips, Echo displays and scans only the first part of each clip, up to the length specified here). Since this operation is time-consuming, Echo does not perform it automatically.A change in MaxDispTextSize is only applied to clips captured after the change has been made. This maintenance action applies the new MaxDispTextSize to all clips in the database. Note that this procedure takes a long time to complete; perhaps as much as 10-15 seconds for a thousand clips in the database. Echo is unresponsive during that time. A small progress bar is displayed to indicate how much of the process has been completed.

ADDED: One new action was added in the “Erase” section of the Database Maintenance dialog:

• Delete application icons: this action deletes from the database all application icons.

ADDED: In the Database Maintenance dialog, a prompt is now displayed if you choose to delete all clips from the database on the Erase tab. The prompt can be disabled directly in the dialog box, or under Preferences -> Prompting -> BeforeErasingAllClips.

CHANGED: When the option to keep Echo always on top of other windows is enabled, Echo no longer automatically hides itself when you switch to another application, even if the option to do so (Preferences -> Display -> MinimizeOnDeactivate) is enabled. This is because hiding Echo in this case defeats the purpose of the “stay on top” feature.

CHANGED: In Preferences -> Display, two options have been removed: TrayNotifications and TrayNotificationsOnlyIfIconic. These options controlled which tray notification messages (“balloons”) to show, but they were incorrectly implemented. Two new options have been added to replace them:

• TrayMsgsToSkip: a list of events for which Echo should not display tray notifications. By default, the list includes only “tnCapture”, which means Echo will not be notifying you every time it captures a clip. All other notifications will be shown by default: tnClipboardConnect (on connecting and disconnecting from clipboard), tnClearClipboard (when clipboard has been cleared), tnMaintenance (when Echo has finished database maintenance) and tnDBCreated (when Echo has created a new database, e.g. because the old one was missing).
• TrayMsgsOnlyWhenIconic: when set to True, Echo will show tray notifications only when it is minimized, buyt not when its window is visible. When set to False, Echo will always show notifications, regardless of its window state.

REMOVED: Preferences -> Database -> StoreFullApplicationPath. This option was false by default. When set to True, it would prevent Echo from finding application icons for clips. Since the full path information is not needed and not used anywhere, the option has been removed. Echo will now store application executable names only (notepad.exe instead of c:\Windows\notepad.exe).

ADDED: support for the VK_APPS key (context menu key)

Download the latest version here

This is only a refresh build, no new features in this release. Added a standard installer and a portable version.

Download the latest version here

ActiveHotkeys detects only global hotkeys, which certain applications register in Windows for their own use. Typically they are used to activate an application when it is minimized or hidden, or to perform other actions without having to bring the application to the front. When an application registers a hotkey, no other app can use that key combination for anything else.

Common keyboard combinations like those listed above are not global hotkeys. They could not be, because if Notepad registered Ctrl+C for “Copy”, you would not be able to use Ctrl+C in any other application as long as Notepad were running. Applications typically use these well-known key combinations for consistency, so that Ctrl+C and Alt+F4 mean the same thing in every program you use. But this is merely a convention, and nothing stops programmers from assigning entirely different shortcuts to the same functions. These keys are not globally registered in Windows though, so ActiveHotkeys does not detect them or list them.

(And yes, an application may reguiter Ctrl+C as a global hotkey for some function it performs. It would be a very bad idea to do so, of course. If an application does that, ActiveHotkeys will tell you.)

Long version: Windows does not make that information available. When an application registers a hotkey, Windows keeps track of the hotkey and the application internally. However, there is no way to ask Windows about that data. The only way to figure out which application a particular hotkey belongs to is to exit one application at a time and see which hotkeys become available after that application was closed.

The only thing ActiveHotkeys could do here is to compare the “before” and “after” lists of registered hotkeys, so that finding the hotkey that became unregistered when an application closed would be easier. Absent such a feature, this can already be done by saving results to file and using a comparison program to find how the two lists differ.

If you find a way, please post a comment or earn some karma at StackOverflow.

This is only a refresh build, no new features in this release. Added a standard installer and a portable version.

Download the latest version here

If you’ve kept bookmarks to ethervane.com, please don’t :-) Trying to maintain two sites instead of one ended up with neither site being maintained for way too long. No matter how much I loved the look of the Moxy template for Joomla, good looks ain’t enough! The domain still exists and redirects here; links to pages inside ethervane.com will no longer work though.

Above, what was. My Joomla experience: look, don’t touch.