Clipboardle - A Copy/Paste Puzzle Game
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
An often ignored part of teaching people to code is also getting them comfortable with text editors. This is different from word processors; it's more than typing and more than learning keyboard shortcuts. One thing I found while live streaming code and narrating what I was doing was that I spent a lot of time moving text around: copy/paste, multiple cursors, using regular expressiosn with find-and-replace. These are skills that programmers kind of pick up over time, unless they stay permanently in a blind spot. So I made a silly little web game to practice these skills: Clipboardle.
The object of Clipboardle is to take a starting text and copy/paste parts of it to create a final goal string in as few pastes as possible. You cannot edit the text directly or erase any text. This forces you to consider the patterns of text between the start and goal text.
I presented Clipboardle at Wonderville Arcade in Brooklyn on January 15, 2026 with this slide deck of links to the various inspirations and related links.
