External text handling

[Chaost]

I'm planning on creating a program which allows you to have more than just one clipboard. I don't plan on manipulating or using the windows clipboard in any way, but make my own solution. I have an idea for the whole thing, but I'm stuck on one thing;

How will I allow my program to pick up on text that happens outside of itself?
Say I was on google.com, I type something into the search bar and highlight it with my cursor, how will my program be able to pick up on that?

I'm not even entirely sure if this is possible, but I imagine it is, does anyone have any ideas as to how I would achieve this?

[kbw]

This should probably be in the Windows Programming section, unless you're targetting other platforms too.

As I understand it, the cat/copy/paste hot keys and menu processing is hard coded to use the Clipboard functions.

There's nothing to stop you from saving what was in the clipboard, using it, then putting things back.

[Chaost]

I'm not sure how to delete this post, but I posted it in windows programming now, which is the platform I want this for!

[Thomas1965]

How will I allow my program to pick up on text that happens outside of itself?

I think this can be done by "Hooks". A hook is basically a peace of code in your app (kind of callback function) that can get called from Windows when a key is pressed, mouse clicked...
However it's complicated and probably not meant for beginners.
Anyway if you are curious...
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms644959(v=vs.85).aspx
https://www.codeproject.com/search.aspx?q=hooks&x=0&y=0&sbo=kw