Introduction
In a previous post, I showed a tool to make Cut and Copy easy on macOS. In this post we’ll look at a tool, Pantherbar, to provide similar capability on Windows.
Pantherbar
Pantherbar is available in the Microsoft Store. It has a free version, as well as a paid one at the reasonable price of $4.99 (US).
Similar to PopClip when you highlight text, it pops up a toolbar.
As you can see from the image above, Pantherbar appears with several icons. The left most is copy, next is cut. If you have anything in the clipboard the paste icon appears next.
The magnifying glass will launch a search in your default browser. By default it is Google, but through the settings you can change the search engine. Finally is the share with windows icon.
Extensions
Pantherbar has a rich set of extensions you can add to it. You can view the full list at http://pantherbar-app.com/extensions
In the free version you can have two extensions active. In the paid version, you can have as many as you want.
In this next example, I’ve loaded three extensions. In the image below I’ve highlighted some text in notepad.
The three new ones on the right are character count (handy for composing a tweet), reverse the text, and remove spaces. In the image below I’ve clicked the reverse text option.
As you can see, the text is reversed immediately, replacing what had been selected.
Note this is a little different than the behavior of PopClip on macOS. PopClip copies the modified text to the clipboard. Pantherbar immediately pastes the new text in.
To be honest, I prefer this behavior. The majority of the time I’m going to put the corrected text where I had selected, so this saves a few steps.
Conclusion
Pantherbar is a useful addition to your Windows toolkit. With its rich set of extensions, you can save a lot of time performing common tasks. You can try it for free, and if you decide to buy the price is very reasonable.
Do note that this, nor the PopClip blog post, are paid posts in anyway. I just like the tools and was happy to pay for them.
To my knowledge there is no similar extension on the Linux platform, at least for the Ubuntu based distros I tend to use. As I understand it, the current graphics engine makes this kind of extension difficult. It’s hoped though that once the Wayland engine gets into wide spread use tools similar to Pantherbar or PopClip will become available on Linux.
If you know of one that exists, by all means leave a comment. I’d love to check it out!
Arcane Code 