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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I used to have a clipboard manager that gave me access to my last X copied items, as well as a navigable list of snippets. A few years back, a MacOS update broke whatever tool I was using, and I ended up buying BetterTouchTool. BTT does give me my clipboard history, and it appears to be very powerful in general, but I can't figure out an easy way to replicate the navigable list of snippets.

I do use the MacOS text expansion system for my name and a few other items, but what it lacks is (1) I cannot use hyperlinked text in the expanded snippet, and (2) it requires me to remember an incantation for each expansion (I want to be able to look at a list of items and pick the one I want.

Does anyone know of a tool that can do this? I don't mind paying, but free is always appreciated!

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Alfred (https://alfredapp.com) has a snippet manager (and a _whole_ lot more kbd goodies)

Raycast's snippets mentioned in the article can do exactly that, screenshot here: https://shots.panaitiu.com/GmT5v4Zj

It can do the incantation thingie, but it also allows binding a hotkey to showing a list of your snippets, searching through them, and inserting them with Enter.

It can also do hyperlinks, bold, italic, if the app you're typing into supports rich text. Example: https://shots.panaitiu.com/gw50Zdcm

Thanks, I was just checking it out based on the article mention. Looks like it's free for personal use, too!

EDIT: Looks like for snippets, it requires a key command to get Raycast to appear, then you have to say Search Snippets, then you have to type your search string, then you have to select the desired snippet. Is it really this many steps? My old workflow was shift-cmd-v, choose the desired snippet via arrow keys, hit return. With muscle memory, this ended up taking less than 4 seconds for most snippets.

Nope, you can do it in a single step. You can record a hotkey for any action that Raycast has, you don't need to go to the main UI: https://shots.panaitiu.com/y6cGQTLN

I rarely if ever see that main search UI, I have hotkeys for all my favorite workflows.

Dope, thanks!

If you can’t get that working, Alfred[1] is a similar app with Snippets functionality including rich text, dynamic replacements, and is configurable to bring up the search by hotkey.

[1]: https://www.alfredapp.com

Just FYI: you can use hyperlinks etc. in the BetterTouchTool expanded snippet. You just need to select the appropriate "Paste Type". You can also enter raw HTML and then select the "Paste Format: Interpret entered text as HTML source" option. When pasted it will then output the formatted text instead of the HTML source.

I've used Quicksilver for clipboard history historically. There is a currently a bug that I've been meaning to delve into: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver/issues/2913 but still generally usable. Particularly handy combined with adding simple AppleScript or JXA actions to manipulate the content (I have several simple ones for example to run a regex, to clean extraneous content around a number, a phone number, strip whitespace, indent 4 spaces for pasting into a markdown codeblock on SO, etc etc).

The Shelf plug-in also very handy along similar lines.

This is the way: https://maccy.app

Looks sleek and very lightweight; where does it say how it handles snippets? Or is the 'pinned' functionality supposed to be used to get old items to hang around?

Yep, for now.

https://github.com/p0deje/Maccy/issues/130

OK thanks. Funny, the commenter in that thread came from the same software as me — ClipMenu. It was simple and worked great!

FastScripts[1] might be worth a look. I've been meaning to check it out myself though so I can't offer any personal experience with it.

[1] https://redsweater.com/fastscripts/

Alfred has a clipboard history among a billion other things

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