Clipboard vs Autocompletion

The world is full of clipboard utilities of which Lifehacker's Texter is but the latest incarnation. Writing as someone who spends most of his working life manipulating text in one form or another, I am always a little surprised by the great success of these applications (ClipMate, FlashPaste and Yankee Clipper spring to mind, not to mention the built-in features of software like Word, etc.) and the relative obscurity of autocomplete applications such as Intellicomplete. The latter are in fact very thin on the ground and, with the exception of Intellicomplete, either ridiculously expensive or extremely limited.

So what exactly is the difference between clipboard and autocomplete?

Clipboard utilities come in varying degrees of sophistication but basically they all do the same thing: they copy and paste text. This is of course very useful when you are dealing with repetitive blocks of text; indeed, it is probably one of the features which most attracts newcomers to word processing in the first place! But copy/paste is not always the best option. Why not? Essentially because the time spent in carrying out the operation, i.e. locating your block in a list, may turn out to be more trouble than it's worth unless a) the block is fairly long or b) it requires no locating because it is right at the top of the list, as in the Windows clipboard. For example, there is nothing in this post which would lend itself to this kind of operation.

This is where autocompletion comes in. See my next post!