Snippets & text expansion

Some text you type over and over: an email signature, a code template, a canned reply, a shipping address. Snippets let you save it once and get it back two ways — pick it from the panel, or have it expand as you type.

Saving a snippet

A snippet has a title, its content, and optionally a category and a syntax (so code snippets show with the right highlighting). Organize them into categories and favorite the ones you use most.

Two ways to use one

Paste from the panel. Open QlipLab, go to Snippets, and click the one you want — QlipLab pastes it into the app you came from, exactly like a clip from history.

Expand inline with a trigger. Give a snippet a short trigger string — say ;sig — and when you type that trigger in any application, QlipLab replaces it with the full snippet on the spot. You never open the window; the text just appears. Snippet auto-expansion is on by default and can be turned off in Settings.

Triggers use longest-match disambiguation, so ;addr and ;address can coexist without one shadowing the other.

Vault items expand too

The same trigger mechanism works for vault items. Give your work address or a frequently-pasted API key a trigger, and it expands inline when you type it — pulled from the encrypted vault at the moment of expansion, never sitting in your clipboard history. This is the safe way to paste something sensitive: it goes straight where you’re typing, and nowhere else.

How it works

Text expansion watches your keystrokes to notice a trigger, then sends the replacement. On macOS that’s the same Accessibility permission the global shortcut and paste-back already use. The watcher runs entirely on your machine — keystrokes are matched against your own triggers locally and are never recorded or transmitted. See Privacy.