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BetterWinTab includes a built-in clipboard history panel accessible from the overlay. Every text entry you copy anywhere on your desktop is captured automatically, so you can retrieve anything you copied in the current session without switching to the source application. The panel is keyboard-navigable — move through entries with the arrow keys and press Enter or click to put an item back on the clipboard.

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Accessing Clipboard History

The clipboard history lives in the special Clipboard folder (FolderType.Clipboard), pinned in the sidebar. To open it:
  1. Press Ctrl+Tab to open the overlay.
  2. Press Tab / Shift+Tab to navigate the sidebar until the Clipboard entry is highlighted, or click it directly.
  3. The window grid is replaced by the clipboard history panel showing recent entries, newest first.
  4. Use Arrow Up / Arrow Down to navigate between items.
  5. Press Enter or click an item to copy it to the clipboard (a “Copied!” toast appears briefly to confirm).

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What Is Tracked

v1 behavior — text only. BetterWinTab captures all text clipboard entries. Images are detected and tracked with a placeholder entry showing [Image], but the image data itself is not stored persistently — only a BitmapImage preview is loaded asynchronously for display. Images cannot be re-pasted from the history panel in v1.
Each captured text entry is stored as a ClipboardItem:
PropertyTypeDescription
IdstringUnique GUID string for the entry
Textstring?The captured text content
IsImagebooltrue for image clipboard events
ImageSourceBitmapImage?Asynchronously loaded bitmap preview (image entries only)
CapturedAtDateTimeTimestamp of when the entry was captured
PreviewstringTruncated to 120 chars with ... suffix; falls back to "[Image]" for images
SingleLinePreviewstring\r\n, \n, and \r replaced with spaces, truncated to 80 chars
TimeAgostringHuman-readable age: "just now", "5m ago", "2h ago", or a date string
SizeInfostringCharacter count for text (e.g. "42 chars"); "Image" for image entries
IsPinnedboolWhether the item is pinned to survive app restarts
Deduplication: if you copy the same text twice, BetterWinTab moves the existing entry to the top of the list rather than adding a duplicate. This keeps the history clean during repetitive copy-paste workflows.

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History Settings

SettingDefaultDescription
ClipboardHistoryEnabledtrueMaster toggle. When disabled, the Clipboard folder is removed from the sidebar and no new entries are captured.
ClipboardHistoryMaxItems50Maximum number of entries to retain. Older items are trimmed from the bottom of the list when the limit is reached.
Both settings are configurable in Settings → General.

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Pinned Clipboard Items

Pin clipboard entries you use repeatedly — code snippets, addresses, boilerplate text — so they survive BetterWinTab restarts. Pinned items always appear at the top of the history panel, separated from regular entries.
Pinning an item marks it with IsPinned = true and adds its Text to AppSettings.PinnedClipboardItems (a List<string>) which is persisted to disk. On the next launch, BetterWinTab restores pinned items into the ClipboardService.History collection before regular session entries. Pinned items are never trimmed by the ClipboardHistoryMaxItems limit.

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How ClipboardService Works

ClipboardService monitors the clipboard using the Win32 AddClipboardFormatListener API, which registers a window handle to receive WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE messages whenever any application changes the clipboard content. 
// Registers the overlay HWND to receive WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE
AddClipboardFormatListener(hwnd);
When a WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE message arrives:
  1. ClipboardService.ProcessMessage(msg) checks the message code and, if _selfCopying is not set, calls CaptureClipboard().
  2. CaptureClipboard() first calls IsClipboardFormatAvailable to determine the content type:
    • Text (CF_UNICODETEXT): opens the clipboard with OpenClipboard(IntPtr.Zero), reads the Unicode text via GetClipboardData, then closes the clipboard.
    • Image (CF_BITMAP or CF_DIB): does not open the clipboard directly — instead creates a placeholder ClipboardItem with IsImage = true immediately, then enqueues an async task to load the actual bitmap via the WinRT Clipboard.GetContent() API on the UI thread.
  3. For text: a new ClipboardItem is created and inserted at index 0 of the History observable collection, or the existing duplicate entry is moved to the top.
  4. For images: a placeholder ClipboardItem with IsImage = true is inserted at index 0, and BitmapImage preview loading is dispatched to the UI thread.
  5. TrimHistory() removes the oldest items if the count exceeds ClipboardHistoryMaxItems.

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Self-Copy Prevention

When you select a history entry and press Enter, BetterWinTab calls ClipboardService.CopyToClipboard(item), which writes the text back to the clipboard via Win32. To prevent this programmatic write from creating a duplicate history entry, the service sets an internal _selfCopying flag before calling OpenClipboard. Any WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE message received while _selfCopying is true is silently ignored. The flag is reset asynchronously via the DispatcherQueue after the clipboard write completes, ensuring that any WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE message already queued by the message pump is also suppressed.

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Image Debouncing

Some applications fire multiple WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE messages for a single image copy. ClipboardService debounces image captures with a 500 ms minimum interval between image entries, discarding rapid duplicates.

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Stopping the Listener

ClipboardService implements IDisposable. Calling Dispose() — or explicitly calling Stop() — unregisters the HWND via RemoveClipboardFormatListener. The service is automatically disposed when the BetterWinTab overlay window is closed.

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