### 2.11 The Clipboard View

GPS has an advanced mechanism for handling copy/paste operations.

When you select the menus `Edit->Copy` or `Edit->Cut`, GPS adds the current selection to the clipboard. As opposed to what lots of applications do, it doesn't discard the previous contents of the clipboard, but save it for future usage. It saves a number of entries this way, up to 10 by default. This value is configurable through the `Clipboard Size` preference.

When you select the menu `Edit->Paste`, GPS will paste the last entry made in the clipboard at the current location in the editor.

If you immediately select `Edit->Paste Previous`, this newly inserted text will be removed, and GPS will instead insert the second to last entry added to the clipboard. You can keep selecting the same menu to get access to older entries.

This is a very powerful mechanism, since it means you can copy several distinct lines from a place in an editor, move to an other editor and paste all these separate lines, without having to go back and forth between the two editors.

The `Clipboard View` provides a graphical mean of seeing what is currently stored in the clipboard. It appears as a list of lines, each of which is associated with one level of the clipboard. The text that shows in these lines is the first line of the selection at that level that contains non blank characters. Leading characters are discarded. `[...]` is prepended or appended in case the selection has been truncated.

If you bring the mouse over a line in the `Clipboard View`, a tooltip will pop up showing the entire selection corresponding to the line by opposition to the possibly truncated one.

In addition, one of the lines has an arrow on its left. This indicates the line that will be pasted when you select the menu `Edit->Paste`. If you select instead the menu `Edit->Paste Previous`, then the line below that one will be inserted instead.

If you double-click on any of these lines, GPS will insert the corresponding text in the current editor, and make the line you clicked on the current line, so that selecting `Edit->Paste` or the equivalent shortcut will now insert that line.

The contextual menu in the clipboard view provides one entry, which is `Append To Previous`. If you select this entry, the select line will be append to the one below, and removed from the clipboard. This means that selection `Edit->Paste` will in fact paste the two entries at the same time. This is in particular useful when you want to copy lines from separate places in the initial file, merge them, and then paste them together one or more times later on, through a single operation.

The Clipboard View content is preserved between GPS sessions. As an exception, huge entries are removed and replaced with an entry saying "[Big entry has been removed]".