After trying a few clipboard management plugins, I also thought they were too powerful and stopped using them. Then I made an effort to grok vim's powerful native clipboard ways and I have mostly managed to educate myself. I will use the named registers whenever I know I am deleting or yanking something I will need later and, for the times I don't plan ahead of time and yank something into the default register before finding there's something else I also need to delete, I will use the black hole register ("_
) not to overwrite the default register. That works well most of the time, but sometimes I will still overwrite a register I shouldn't have. In those cases, I use Diodon. It's an external tool that lives in my system traybar and keeps track of everything I ever have in my sistem's clipboard. That includes stuff I yank in vim, since I have set clipboard=unnamedplus
. It's a bit of a change of paradigm every time I have to use Diodon, using the mouse and the system tray, but that's not a big deal, since it's only my backup plan and I don't have to resort to it all the time.
I've been using Diodon for a while now too: It has a systray entry, but it also has a keyboard shortcut [defaults to ctrl+alt+v] to bring up the clipboard list and preferences link wherever you are - which is what you seem to be looking for.
clipit
(parcellite
fork): http://www.webupd8.org/2011/01/parcellite-has-new-developer-and-new.html
diodon
: https://launchpad.net/diodon
glippy
: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/10/glippy-clipboard-manager-gets-files-and.html
And what I actually use: glipper
Glipper hasn't been updated in a long time, has some bugs in certain DEs but I'm just used to its simplicity, clipboard history clearing feature (shortcut and I like if the current clipboard entry is also deleted, some don't do that) and built in snippet plugin (permanent entries). I only use clipboard manager for text.