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Using the Clipboard and Scrapbookt

 You can cut and paste text in the editor by using the Edit Operations menu. This menu automatically appears whenever you select text in the editor by dragging the mouse over a sequence of characters.

Both Windows NT and X Windows systems have a clipboard, which serves as a holder for text and data that has been cut or copied from any clipboard-compliant applications.

The editor has a scrapbook, which is a special workspace that maintains text that you cut and copy from the editor. The scrapbook was used prior to the clipboard, but remains as part of the editor. G2 creates a scrapbook workspace the first time you cut or copy text in the editor. The scrapbook is a transient, non-KB workspace, which is not saved when you save the KB. The text items stored in the scrapbook are text inserters, which means that you can also use them to insert text directly into the editor.

Whenever you complete a cut or copy operation in the editor, or drag your cursor over text that is outside the editor, G2 copies the text both to the clipboard and the scrapbook. The clipboard text is then used as the pasting source, and the scrapbook text remains unused. You can access scrapbook text as described in Interacting with the Scrapbook Directly.

The amount of text you can cut or copy at one time is limited by the G2 text clipboard buffer, which can hold a maximum of 32766 characters, including invisible characters such as a linefeed. Attempting to copy more than the maximum number of characters to the clipboard truncates the copied text.

To cut and paste text in the editor:

  1. Drag the mouse cursor over the sequence of characters you want to cut, and release the mouse.

    G2 displays the Edit Operations menu:


  2. Choose the cut command to delete the text from the current cursor location and place it in the scrapbook.

  3. Move the cursor to the new location where you want to paste the text.

  4. Choose the Paste button on the left side of the editor to insert the text.

    Note: Choosing the Paste button a second time inserts the same text again.

Interacting with the Scrapbook Directly

 You can look at the contents of the scrapbook by displaying the Scrapbook workspace. The scrapbook contains text inserters, which allow you to insert the text item directly into the editor by clicking it. For detailed information about creating and using text inserters, see Using Text Inserters to Insert Text into the Text Editor.

To display the scrapbook:

To insert text directly from the scrapbook:

  1. Open the editor, and place your cursor in the location in the editor where you want to insert text from the scrapbook.

  2. With the scrapbook, insert text in one of two ways:

    1. To insert the entire text item, click on a text inserter in the scrapbook.

    2. To insert part of the text item, drag the cursor over the sequence of characters you want to insert, starting from the left side.

Controlling the Amount of Text in the Scrapbook

 By default, G2 keeps only 50 text items in the scrapbook. When you cut or copy more than ten items, G2 deletes the last item on the workspace and inserts the new text item at the top.

You can control the amount of text that the scrapbook holds, and you can delete individual text items in the scrapbook or the entire scrapbook.

To edit the maximum number of text items in the scrapbook:

To delete a text item in the scrapbook:

To delete the entire scrapbook:

G2 creates a new Scrapbook workspace the next time you cut or copy text.

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