Cycle Items - Quick: Notifications delayed with native Windows notifications

The Cycle Items - Quick command is difficult to use on Microsoft Windows. For starters, the description is quite unclear, claiming it is “Like Cycle Items command”, which itself is poorly documented, and calling notifications “popups”.

How this works is extra hard to understand on Windows since by default, notifications do not show at the appropriate time. Windows 11 shows the first notification for 5 s. During that time, it does not display ulterior notifications (unless showing the Notification center). So if one quickly calls the command twice, it takes at least 5 s to see the contents of the second notification. When notifications get queued, Windows 11 seems to accelerate display after the first notification goes away. This means it takes less times to get to the fifth item, but it also means that item displays for a maximum of 1 s.

The following description would improve:

Has the same purpose as the Cycle Items command, but previews items to paste in notifications instead of showing the main window. This command requires a global shortcut, which needs to have at least one key modifier. The default shortcut is Ctrl+;. The selected item is pasted once all modifiers (by default, Ctrl) are released.

Previewing works fine using CopyQ’s built-in (classic) notifications, but may be poor using native notifications. Notably, on Windows 10 and above, the display of the notification corresponding to the current item may be delayed by previous notifications.

However, for affected Windows installs, the best would be to keep a handle to each notification and cancel these when displaying the next notification.

🅭🄍