Pastebin Desktop

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on July 05, 2011

Cutting and pasting text is a pretty utilitarian task, but did you know it can also be a form of social networking? Pastebin is a Web site that allows users to store copied text online both for their own future use and, optionally, for others to view. Users can even follow each other and view a running stream of pastes from their friends. Pastebin Desktop is a program that lets users upload text directly to Pastebin without going to the Web site. If Pastebin is something that you make frequent use of, the desktop application is a handy thing to have around.

Registration on Pastebin is required in order to use the program, and once we took care of that, using Pastebin Desktop was easy. The program hangs out as an icon in your system tray until you're ready to use it. We clicked on the icon and a simple interface appeared with a large text box for our paste. We pasted our text, clicked Submit, and the program uploaded our text to Pastebin, where we were able to retrieve it with its own unique URL. A settings menu allows users to specify how long they want their paste to stay on the site, whether it's public or private, and the type of link they'd like for the paste (normal, raw, embed, or download). Since one of Pastebin's primary purposes is to handle large chunks of code, it also offers syntax highlighting for a huge number of programming languages. Overall, we liked Pastebin Desktop quite a bit; it was easy to use and could be a major time-saver for those who access Pastebin frequently.

Pastebin Desktop installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls politely. We recommend this program to all users.