The paste stack

Turning it on

The paste stack is a queue. You add things to the back of it and paste them off the front, one press at a time. It is for the job where you have three or four values in one place and four boxes to put them in.

It is off until you turn it on in Settings › General › Sequential paste stack. Turning it on adds the two shortcuts below to your computer; turning it off again removes them and empties the queue.

Queue three things and paste them

1. Copy the first thing
   Select the first value in the page you are copying from, then press Ctrl + Alt + D. Relic copies the selection for you and puts it at the back of the queue.
2. Queue the rest, in order
   Do the same for the second value, then the third. The queue keeps the order you added them in.
3. Click into the first field
   Move to the form you are filling and click into the first field.
4. Press Ctrl + Alt + B for each field
   Press Ctrl + Alt + B. The first thing you queued goes in, and leaves the queue. Tab to the next field and press it again. Three presses, three values, in the order you copied them.

First in, first out. Copy 1, 2, 3 and you paste 1, 2, 3. If you had it the other way round, press Reverse in the window before you start.

You can also queue from the window. Hold Ctrl + Click to pick several rows, then press Stack in the bar that appears. They queue in the order they are listed, and a toast says how many.

Anything you queue with the shortcut is captured the way any copy is, so it is in your history afterwards as well as in the queue.

The queue in the window

While the queue has something in it, a strip sits above the list in the Relic window. It counts what is waiting, shows each item as a small chip in the order it will come out, and gives you two buttons.

• Reverse flips the order. It appears once there are two or more in the queue.
• Clear empties the queue without pasting anything.
• The x on a chip drops that one item and leaves the rest alone.

The strip is the antidote to a queue you cannot see: two shortcuts that change what a third key does are easy to lose track of, so the queue lives where you already look.

The queue in the tray

The tray menu carries the same count, so you can check the queue without opening the window. The two lines appear only while something is queued.

The queue lives as long as Relic is running. Closing the window keeps it. Quitting Relic empties it, and so does turning the feature off. The tray menu explains the rest of the lines.

What Relic tells you

Every press says what it did, because neither shortcut opens a window.

• Nothing to queue means Relic could not read a selection or a clipboard. Select something, or copy it yourself, and press the key again.
• Already queued means you pressed the add key twice on the same thing without copying anything in between. The same value twice in a form is normal, so queuing a genuine second copy is still allowed.
• Paste stack is empty means there is nothing to paste. An empty queue does nothing at all. It never falls back to pasting whatever happens to be on your clipboard, because that would put text you did not choose into a document.
• Stack empty. That was the last item. The one you just pasted was the end of the queue.

Why Ctrl+Alt

These two are the only shortcuts in Relic that use Ctrl and Alt. Ctrl+Shift+D and Ctrl+Shift+B are Chrome's bookmark keys, and a global shortcut takes a chord away from every app on the machine, so picking those would have quietly broken bookmarking for everyone.

Ctrl+Alt has two known costs. On some keyboard layouts it is the AltGr key, so it can collide with a character. Some Linux desktops already use Ctrl+Alt+D to show the desktop. In both cases your system refuses to give the chord to Relic rather than stealing it, the Settings row says so in red, and you can pick another. Both rows only appear while the feature is on. The shortcuts page lists the Mac and Linux keycaps.