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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Windows - Create a Shortcut/Hotkey to Clear the Clipboard

Have you ever copied something to the clipboard that you don’t want to leave there in case somebody else is going to use your computer? Sure, you can copy something else to the clipboard real quick, but can’t you just make a shortcut or hotkey to clear it?

And of course you can, with the built-in clip.exe utility in Windows 7 or Vista (see conclusion regarding XP). It’s not really meant for clearing the clipboard, but with a little command line magic in a shortcut, we can make it do just that.

NOTE: This is also useful if you copied a very large amount of data to the clipboard and you don’t want it wasting memory anymore.



1. Create a Shortcut Icon to Clear the Clipboard

Right-click on the desktop or elsewhere, and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.


2. Shortcut command

Then in the shortcut location box, enter the following command:

cmd /c “echo off | clip”

3. Shortcut icon created

At this point you’ll have an icon that will immediately clear the clipboard… but we can tweak it a bit further.

4. Tweak shortcut

Right-click on the icon and choose Properties, and then change the Run drop-down to “Minimized” to make sure you don’t see the command prompt. You can also assign a shortcut key here.

5. Change the icon

If you click the Change Icon button and then browse down to this file, you can find a clipboard icon:

%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll

6. Final shortcut

Now we’ve got a nice-looking icon that will clear out the clipboard:





Conclusion

NOTE:
If you are using Windows XP, you can download CLIP.EXE from Microsoft. Just save the file in the Windows directory and the rest of the hack should work for you.

Clip.exe comes with Windows Server 2003, but it also works in Windows XP Professional. Simply copy Clip.exe from the Windows\System32 directory on a Windows Server 2003 system, and then paste it into the Windows\System32 directory on a Windows XP system.

If you don’t have access to Windows Server 2003, you can download a copy of Clip.exe from Daniel Petri’s IT Knowledgebase site. (see reference below).

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