I am currently using a dual screen KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) setup. I chose to use a KVM because I did not have the money or the space to run more monitors. Both of the computers are connected to a network so that I am able to see the same documents on both computers and do just about any file manipulation I want to do on both. One computer is running XP, and the other is a Vista/Ubuntu dual boot system.

There is one feature I wish to add to this setup, and that is a shared/network/remote clipboard. It would be really handy to be able to copy and paste text and images between the two computers. Text would be enough to keep me happy, but the ability to copy and paste images would be a real bonus.

I had seen some tools around the web in the past which I thought would do the job for me. I initially wanted to test them out to so that I could recommend the best one to the readers of Inspect My Gadget. I did not have any luck in getting any of them to work so I am turning this article over to you.

This article will take a look at a handful of Network Clipboard options which are all available for free online. I didn’t think it would be so hard to get this feature up and running, because there are existing applications designed for this task. I assumed it was a feature that many people would want, and possibly already use. Have you had success with getting similar functionality on your network? Please, let me know, this one has me stumped.

Normally when I write a post for Inspect My Gadget, I think of a feature I would like my computer to have, I do some research and some testing and then I post what I have found to be the best. In this case, I was completely unsuccessful in finding a solution.

Remote desktop has network clipboard functionality built in to it. It is something I took for granted. You are able to copy and paste between the local and remote computers. This is not suitable for my situation as it makes the KVM switch invalid. If I were to use remote desktop all the time to access the second computer, there would be frustrating performance issues.

I looked online and found the following Network Clipboards.

• Synergy
• The Network Clipboard
• Remote Clipboard
• nClip
• Clipster
• Network Clipboard

I downloaded them all and took them home to try out. I did no success with any of them. I did succeed in connecting some of these programs over the network, but even then I was unable to get the clipboards to sync. I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be something to do with how Vista works and handles its clipboard.

All of these programs run in the task-bar and all of the programs are designed for Windows XP unless stated. I can see many advantages to cross platform solutions. If I could copy and paste from Ubuntu, that would be a huge bonus.

Windows own clipbrd.exe:

clipbrd.exe comes with Windows XP. It is the clipboard viewer and it lets you see what data is in the clipboard. This can be copied to Vista to see the contents of Vistas clipboard. There are connect and disconnect options but these were greyed out for me. 

It looks like clipbrd may do what I want but I was unsuccessful in getting it to work. It requires old .clp files from NT/3.1 days. I tried to make my own clp file but clipbrd did not recognise it. Windows however did recognise it as a clipboard file as it changed the icon in Windows explorer.

I always like to use inbuilt features of the operating system where ever possible as it is usually a quicker and more reliable option. Clipbrd however is not part of XP even though it comes with it. It is some left over shrapnel from previous releases which they threw in for kicks.

Synergy

I visited a lot of sites and Synergy was mentioned as the ideal choice. It has a network clipboard built in, thought this is not the task it was designed for. Synergy allows you to share one keyboard and mouse between two computers. Once it is set up correctly, moving your mouse cursor from one computer to another, gives you control of that computer.

I can see this being frustrating in a KVM situation because Synergy itself is a virtual KVM switch. It is designed for you to have both computers with monitors set up side by side. If the software and the KVM can both be in control of different computers simultaneously, conflicts will occur.

I was not successful in getting this program to work. There was some very positive feedback for it online, so it is probably worth checking it out if you want to use it for what it was designed for.

Available for free from SourceForge.

NetClipboard

This program looked promising as it was designed to do exactly what I wanted. It’s only limitation before installing it seemed to be that NetClipboard could only be used to copy text.

Netclipboard is a little odd as you don’t need a client on each machine. You only need to run the program on once of them. As dJsLiM (the author of clipster) says, it’s all a bit too magical.

The installation was fine. There are runtime files which need to be installed along side it. These were easy enough to install so I started the program up. I followed all the instructions I could get my hands on and I still could not get the two computers to talk to each other. Everything looked like it should have worked, it just didn’t.

Available for free from SourceForge.

Remote Clipboard

Remote Clipboard is the most modern out of the clipboard programs I tested. It was also the most professional of the releases. The install was nice and clean. The program came up with an interface which offered more options than the other clipboard utilities.

Remote Clipboard looked good as it did not require any special keys to work as some of the others did. You can use the same context menu that pops up when you right click to copy and paste text and images normally.

Remote Clipboard automatically scans the network for other computers running the software. It successfully found my second computer. I was unable to copy and paste though. The clipboard did not change from the local machines clipboard.

Available for free from topqualityfreeware.

nClip:

Nclip is a stand-alone executable. This program asks you for a shared network path rather than an IP address or machine name. In this path, nclip creates a file called clip which contains the copied text. I was able to copy data from XP into this file, but Vista would not paste the text from the file. I could not copy to the file from Vista either.

I have confidence that this will work between two Windows XP machines because it worked for me on the XP side.

nClip uses ctrl-alt-c to copy and ctrl-alt-v to paste. I recommend giving this program a go if you have two Windows XP machines. There are even sounds when you have done a successful copy or paste, which is quite comforting.

Available for free from asc.sk

Clipster:

Clipster is coded in Python so it can be ported to various operating systems easily. It uses the same ctrl-alt-c, ctrl-alt-v keyboard combinations as nClip. There is support for both text and images.

I could not get this program to launch in Vista, and I had very minimal success with loading the program in XP. I could not test this program out any further as I couldn’t get the client to load in Vista. The best best thing about the program is the website. The guy has a sense of humour.

Available for free from SourceForge.

Network Clipboard:

Network clipboard is a bit more complicated than the others. It has a few benefits such as encryption and password protection. It also works a bit differently from the others. You type in the address of the computer you want to send the text to and press send. The text gets copied into a window on the second computer. It can then be copied from this window.

This program did not work for me either. I was able to get it running on each of the computers but I could not get the software on each machine to connect to each other.

It looks like you may be required to copy the text into it, press send and then copy the text back out of it on the second machine. It’s a little bit messy. 

Available for free from Globware.

A couple of work-arounds

I have been wondering if there are work-arounds that will allow me to copy text back and forth between computers. The solutions below are both hopeless and highly impractical, but they are the only working solutions I have found so far.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat): You could create your own chat room on an IRC server. For each computer you log in as a different user. If you copy and paste text into it on one computer, you could switch to the other and copy and paste it to where you want. This is the best solution if the programs above don’t work for you. This is a desperate solution.

Shared Text Document: You could create a text document on a network share. If you create a shortcut on your desktop so that you can access it quickly, you could copy and paste text into it. You would have to save it and close it before switching across to the second computer. This is messy and should be avoided. It will take minutes to copy the line of text. There’s more clicking than you would want to do.

Conclusion:

There is no positive outcome for me in this article. If I had two computers side by side on a desk and neither of those computers were Vista, Synergy is probably the way to go. Sharing a keyboard and mouse clears up desk space greatly. A KVM switch clears it even more by reducing the amount of monitors you have.

If you have two XP computers, it is worth looking into Remote Clipboard. It felt like this one would work.

Have you had any success with such applications? Have you wanted to do the same thing and found a clever way to go about it? Please let me know in the comments section below.

I hope you have found this article useful, if not only to save you time from finding and running through these programs yourself. Please stick around and check out some other articles at Inspect My Gadget.