Managing Text Clipping Snippets On Mac OS X

Just in case you somehow missed this, Mac OS X will create a "Clipping" file if you just drag a chunk of selected text to your desktop. You can later drag that back anytime you want to paste the same chunk somewhere else. That's nice - it augments the Clipboard Utility that I use. But there were several things I did not like about Clippings so I seldom used them.

First, I didn't like them cluttering my Desktop. They take their names from the text you cut, which tends to fill up your desktop with lots of oddly named files. It's messy, and it's not easy to quickly find the Clip you want.

That's especially true if you have clips with similar starting text. But look what happens if you drop the clippings into another folder and use the Preview view:

I have this folder on my Desktop so that I can more easily drag text to it, but with spring loaded folders you could keep it anywhere. I get to see the contents and can just click in the Preview to drag the clip anywhere I want to paste it.

This makes Clippings much more useful for me.