📋 Edit Clipboard Contents Tool

Windows application for inspection and editing of raw clipboard contents

✔️ Key Features

• View Details of Every Clipboard Object: View all clipboard format objects currently in use and their contents
• Raw Content Editing: Modify clipboard data at the hexadecimal level, then save the changes back to the clipboard
• Individual Object Removal: Ability to delete individual objects from the clipboard altogether
• Add Custom Formats: Add a new format to the clipboard with a specific name or ID, as well as the data contents
• Data Structure Analysis: Examine the object structure of many supported formats
• Save & Restore: Export and import clipboard contents
• Format Reordering: Rearrange clipboard format priority order
• Binary Data Filetype Detection: Automatic detection of 300+ file types using byte signatures

Screenshot:

🔍 Main Features

1. All-Format Clipboard Inspection

• View every clipboard format currently in use, including:
  • Standard formats (text, images, files)
  • Application-specific formats
  • System and "synthesized" formats
• Display format details such as:
  • Format name and ID
  • Data size
  • Identify likely "synthesized" formats, meaning the system added them automatically
  • Parsed metadata details for certain supported formats like BMP image dimensions
  • Visual indicators for known exportable types
  • Extra information about underlying data structure
• View the object struct info for certain standard formats such as Bitmap formats (CF_BITMAP, CF_DIB, CF_DIBV5)
• View raw data alongside interpreted text in either UTF-8 or UTF-16

2. Raw Content Editing

• Edit multiple clipboard objects, then apply pending changes when ready
• Edit clipboard contents at the hexadecimal level
• Real-time plaintext preview of hex edits
  • Support for both UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings
• Or just remove individual objects/formats
• Load raw data directly from files
• Clear clipboard contents entirely
• Rearrange clipboard format priority order

3. Backup and Restore

• Export entire clipboard contents as:
  • ZIP file
  • Folder structure
• Export specific format ranges
• Re-import saved formats from backup

4. Add Custom Formats

• Add one or multiple data formats to the clipboard
• Specify a custom name or ID number to use for each
• Edit the raw contents of custom formats just like any other, or even use null data

5. Advanced Features

• Timed refresh capability
  • Set custom delay for automatic clipboard refresh
  • This might be useful to see if an app sets different clipboard data while certain actions are occurring, during which you wouldn't be able to normally click the refresh button
• Progress tracking for format loading
• Debug console available (launch with -console argument)
• Presentation of underlying data structures for supported formats
• Manually search for specific formats by format ID or name
  • If the format was already in the list, it will be updated, or otherwise added
  • Good for updating specific formats while preserving the rest

6. Export Capabilities

• Text file containing raw data converted to hexadecimal
• Raw data as binary file
  • Some non-standard formats such as PNG just contain the entire file as the raw data, so in such cases exporting it as a file would result in the working PNG image
• Native file export for certain formats
  • Example: The three native bitmap formats (CF_BITMAP, CF_DIB, CF_DIBV5) don't directly contain the same data that would be found by opening a .bmp file, but rather the image data as well as other struct metadata. But the app will use the Native Windows API to output each format to a BMP file, and each may be slightly different despite supposedly containing the same image data.
• Export a list of all registered clipboard format names on the system

7. View Clipboard History Info

• See the info stored by Windows in the clipboard history (if enabled)
• For each item in the history, see which formats are available, and preview each
• Ability to delete items from the clipboard history, and make any as the active item

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How To Compile:

Requirements:

• Only requires Visual Studio 2022
  • At the moment there are no external dependencies beyond the .NET Framework 4.8 built into windows (no need to download anything extra, install any Nuget packages, etc)

Instructions:

1. Open the "Solution" file (EditClipboardContents.sln) with Visual Studio 2022
   • The entire solution/project is included with the repo, so after opening it should be ready to compile and run immediately after opening it
2. Optional: Choose the build "configuration" mode (Either Release or Debug)
   • The Debug configuration is for during development, and you'll notice the app will have an additional menu called [Debugging] with some various options and modes that do not appear in release mode, and an additional label in the UI with some layout info at the top. Debugging menu examples:
     • An option to have the tooltip show the dimensions and location coordinates of Windows Forms controls when hovering over them, like when debugging scaling or layout issues
     • A "Test" button you can use to run miscelaneous code you can put in that button's event handler
     • A button used to parse the table from a wikipedia page containing file signatures and convert it to JSON, so it can be used as an embedded reference by the program
3. Compile by going to Build (top menu) > Build Solution, or if in Debug configuration, Debug > Start Debugging (Or just click the toolbar button that says "Start" with the green triangle)