Disable clipboard feature or set auto-delete

[danielhug-cc]

What problem would this solve?

The clipboard feature is always on (so I believe), and captures login names, passwords etc. I am not very comfortable with that. I would wish for some limits to this function. JGS's AceText offers to exclude applications (if [application] has focus, don't capture clipboard). For SV-WB, which is not primarily a clipboard extension, it should be possible to turn this function off altogether.
You could refine this further like "if there is no string in the clipboard that matches either a target language word or a source language word, don't add to clipboard history". This would likely (hopefully!!) exclude passwords. But would it be bulky and slow?
Mainly, I want to turn this function off.

Thanks!

Proposed solution

Add a checkbox: "Turn off clipboard extension"
Optionally: "Remove stored clipboard entries older than X minutes."
Optionally: "Don't capture clipboard if and of the below applications has the focus." (Requires a list of apps, and or a regex that describes all apps that should be excluded."

Alternatives considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[michaelbeijer]

Hi @danielhug-cc, this is a very good suggestion and I will implement it today!

[michaelbeijer]

Hi @danielhug-cc, this is implemented and pushed – it will be in v1.10.369.

You asked for one thing and suggested two others; all three are in, under Settings → 📋 Clipboard. They can be combined, and every control saves and takes effect the moment you change it – no Save button, no restart.

1. Turn it off – "Capture clipboard history"

The master switch you asked for. Worth saying exactly what "off" means here, since it was the point of your report: the check sits at the very top of the capture path, before Workbench reads the clipboard. So a password isn't read, hashed, displayed or written to the database – it never enters Workbench's memory at all. Filtering after reading would have been much easier to write and would not actually have solved your problem.

Anything already in the history stays (use Clear all on the Clipboard tab for that), and the tab shows a red ⏸ Capture off badge while the switch is off, so an empty history never looks like a fault.

2. Remove entries older than X minutes

Anything from 1 minute to 7 days. Entries past the window are deleted from the database, not just hidden from the list. The sweep runs about once a minute and also once at startup – so if Workbench has been closed for three hours with a one-hour window set, those clips are gone before the list is ever drawn, rather than flashing up and disappearing a minute later.

3. Don't capture while certain applications have the focus

Process names as they appear in Task Manager (keepass.exe, 1password.exe, …), matched case-insensitively, and the .exe is optional. There's an Add common password managers button that fills in a dozen of them in one click.

One caveat: this one is Windows-only, because identifying which application currently has the focus needs the Windows API. The master switch and the retention window work everywhere, and the Settings page says as much on other platforms.

I went with plain process names rather than regex, on the grounds that a regex is a lot of rope for a control that fails silently by design. If you hit a case that genuinely needs patterns, say so and I'll look at it again.

A note on defaults: capture stays on, automatic deletion stays off, and the exclusion list starts empty, so nothing changes for anyone who doesn't visit the page. I deliberately did not pre-fill the exclusion list with password managers: if you copied a URL out of KeePass and it silently never appeared in your history, you'd rightly call that a bug – so it's one click away rather than imposed.

Docs: https://docs.supervertaler.com/workbench/clipboard/overview/#privacy-controlling-what-gets-captured

Thanks for raising it – it was a fair thing to be uncomfortable about, and the feature is better for it.

[michaelbeijer]

See: