Right-Click Any File, Get Its Text on Your Clipboard
You need the text inside a file: a config to paste into an email, a log to drop into a chat, a CSV to share with a colleague. So you open it, wait for the app, press Ctrl+A, press Ctrl+C, and close it again. Do that a dozen times a day and it adds up.
ReadFileToClipboard removes every one of those steps. Right-click any file in Explorer and its text is on your clipboard, without opening it, selecting all, or pressing Ctrl+C.
Updated on 2026/10/05 to Version: 1.1.0
PDF and Office Files Too
Add the free anydoc converter and PDFs, Excel sheets and PowerPoint decks come out as clean Markdown text too. Word .docx files work even without it, thanks to a built-in fallback reader.
What It Does
A “Read file to clipboard” entry on every file
Install the Explorer menu entry once from the tray icon. From then on, every file you right-click has a Read file to clipboard option. No admin rights needed, and you can remove the entry again from the same tray menu.
Reads almost any text file
Plain text, source code, scripts, INI, CSV, JSON, HTML and Markdown are read directly. Shortcuts (.lnk) are followed to the real file, and Internet shortcuts (.url) copy just the web address.
Accents and symbols paste correctly
The file’s encoding is detected for you: UTF-8 with or without a byte order mark, UTF-16, and older ANSI files. Accented letters and special symbols arrive intact instead of turning into garbage characters.
A preview so you know what you copied
A notification pops up with the file name, the character count and the first lines of the text, so you can see at a glance that you grabbed the right file.
Make the preview your own
The dark-themed Preferences window lets you choose how many lines and characters the preview shows, the font size, and the background color with a built-in color picker. The text color can switch between black and white automatically to stay readable.
Clear errors you can paste
If a file cannot be read (too big, a scanned PDF with no text, a binary file), the notification shows a red icon and the reason, and the same message goes to your clipboard so you can paste it when asking for help.
Requirements
- Windows 10 or 11
- AutoHotkey v2.0.2 or newer
- No admin rights needed (the menu entry is installed for your user account only)
- Optional: the anydoc converter, for PDF, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office formats
Stop opening files just to copy what is inside them. Right-click any file in Explorer and its text is on your clipboard, without opening it, selecting all, or pressing Ctrl+C.
