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Snippets

Snippets

A snippet is a piece of text you paste often. Create one with Create Snippet, find it with Search Snippets, or just type its name in root search and press ↵ to paste it.

Creating a snippet

Section titled “Creating a snippet”
Field Required What it is
Name yes What you search for
Keyword no Also searchable, and the auto-expand trigger
Snippet yes The text that gets pasted

Pick a distinctive keyword such as ;sig or ;addr. A short everyday word will fire when you did not mean it to.

Actions

Section titled “Actions”

From Search Snippets: Paste, Copy to Clipboard, Edit, Create Snippet, and Delete (which confirms first).

If a snippet’s text contains {argument}, the list’s search bar turns into a field for that value before pasting.

Auto-expansion

Section titled “Auto-expansion”

With auto-expansion on, typing a snippet’s keyword in any application replaces it in place with the expanded text. Settings → Snippets:

Setting Options Default
Auto-Expand Snippets on / off off
Trigger Instant, After Delimiter Instant

Instant expands the moment the keyword is fully typed. After Delimiter waits until you type a space, tab or enter after it, and consumes that delimiter.

Things worth knowing:

  • Snippets that take an argument are never auto-expanded. Their keyword still works from the palette.
  • A snippet with no keyword is never auto-expanded.
  • When two keywords overlap, the longer one wins.
  • A snippet using {selection} briefly copies your current selection while expanding.
  • Edits take effect within a couple of seconds without a restart.

Platform support

Section titled “Platform support”
Platform Auto-expansion Requires
macOS yes Accessibility permission; Input Monitoring is also prompted
Windows yes nothing extra
Linux (X11) yes the X server’s XRecord extension
Linux (Wayland) no not possible — see Linux notes

When it cannot start, the Snippets settings pane shows a banner explaining why rather than failing silently.

Placeholders

Section titled “Placeholders”

Placeholders work in snippets and, with a smaller set, in Quicklinks.

Placeholder Expands to Options
{clipboard} The current clipboard text offset=N is accepted but has no effect today — see below
{selection} Selected text in the frontmost app
{argument} A value you are prompted for default="…", name="…"
{snippet name="…"} Another snippet’s text, itself expanded name= required. Snippets only
{date} A date, default d MMM yyyy offset=, format=, locale=
{time} A time, default h:mm a offset=, format=, locale=
{datetime} Date, then at, then time offset=, format=, locale=
{day} A weekday name, default EEEE offset=, format=, locale=
{uuid} A random UUID
{cursor} Nothing — marks where the caret lands after pasting
{calculator expression="…"} The result of an expression expression= required

A token that cannot be resolved is left in the text exactly as you wrote it, so a typo is visible rather than silently dropped.

Date and time options

Section titled “Date and time options”

offset= takes space-separated terms, each a sign, a number and a unit letter: y years, M months, d days, h hours, m minutes.

{date offset="+2y +5M -3d"}
{time offset="+90m" format="HH:mm"}
{day offset="+1d"}

Month arithmetic clamps to the target month’s last day, so 31 January plus one month is 28 or 29 February.

format= accepts yyyy yy MMMM MMM MM M dd d EEEE EEE E HH H hh h mm m ss s SSS a. Text in single quotes passes through literally. locale= takes a tag such as fr-FR and changes month and weekday names.

Modifiers

Section titled “Modifiers”

Chain modifiers after a |, applied left to right.

Modifier Effect
uppercase Upper-cases the value
lowercase Lower-cases the value
trim Strips surrounding whitespace
percent-encode Escapes it for a URL
json-stringify Quotes and escapes it as JSON
raw Opts out of the caller’s own escaping 
{clipboard | trim | uppercase}
{argument name="repo" | percent-encode}
Section titled “Related”