this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Windows did not have a functional clipboard. Go look at all the complaints over the years.
Windows historically had only a single-item clipboard and no built-in UI/history.
A separate one shipped with MS Office that let you store something like 12 to 20 items. Why? Because windows sucked and DID NOT HAVE ONE.
Windows itself did not get a built in Win+V searchable/historical clipboard until windows 10.
Yes, better than XP, still not good. I am not going to do your homework, but Windows 10 was the first release that really focused on isolation, secrets management, and virtualization of applications for system wide and user protection.
Just as well, you don't know what you are talking about anyways.
I understand that you personally want a fancy clipboard with lots of features; but for me, I actually explicitly deliberately only want a single item clipboard. I want the predictable simple certainty of what is and what is not stored in the clipboard. And if I ever had a multi-item clipboard with a UI interface, I'd be calling that confusing bloatware and looking for how to delete it.
So I don't think we should rank each OS by how fancy its clipboard is.
I want a basic clipboard. That is what it is. You can use it however you like, so that is choice. What is stored on top is last in, just like any clipboard. And you could set it to 1 if you want to only have one item.
I find it so weird that you call functionality "confusing and bloatware" and want to delete it. I have a hard time understanding what you actually do with a computer then. It has been part of my workflow since the late 80's. I would think a clipboard, that windows finally included is not "confusing and bloatware" due to popular demand.
I mean do you not use a GUI at all? You sound like maybe a terminal only experience is right for you. Speaking of which, windows lack of terminal history ALSO is so damn annoying. Another feature they recently got (see the trend?). Although it STILL does not have persistence.
In any case, since so many people asked for it, and Microsoft finally added a half functioning clipboard, I would think that it is ONE of a hundred plus reasons why the windows desktop is FINALLY catching up to a linux one. Which was the whole point of the discussion. You may not like a feature, which is fine, but a lot of people do. Until recently microsoft didnt have it but now does, I think it is fair to say Linux was ahead of Microsoft on features in the DE.
Sure. I agree with that. But I think you're seeing this in reverse of the point I was trying to make. My point is that you might think this feature is mission critical, but a lot of people do not. The purpose of my previous post was to imply that you are over-emphasising its importance.
Am I? There certainly are windows users that have no idea they want it (just like right click wasn't a big deal until it was).
There are a lot of forum posts and questions asking Microsoft for it.
But what about numbers? Honestly I don't know and probably cant know how many people would be interested. I also don't know what a threshold of users would be to say, yes this might be important. 10%? over 50%?
What I do know is that just one third party tool for windows has been around since 2003. So 22 years of interest.
I also know that they have had at least 500 downloads a week pretty consistently year over year at source forge, with another estimated 50,000 users that have gotten it from the Microsoft store.
Modern ditto as an extention to the current windows clipboard is on github with 5.7k stars and active.
Seems to me there are a lot of users who like to have clipboards. Maybe microsoft made the right move to put in what I consider basic functionality to their desktop as a large number of users were looking for it.
And that is only Ditto. There are a lot more like CopyQ and 1clipboard.