The library

The library window is where you write and organize snippets. Open it from the menu bar icon (Open Snippet Library), with ⌘O in the picker, or by opening HandyPaste from the Applications folder.

It has three columns:

• Sidebar: All Snippets, Favorites, Recent, your folders, and Recently Deleted when it holds something.
• List: the snippets in whatever you selected.
• Editor: the selected snippet's title, keyword, folder and text.

Create snippets and folders

Action	How
New snippet	⌘N or the compose button. It goes into the selected folder, with its title ready to type.
New folder	⇧⌘N or New Folder at the bottom of the sidebar
Duplicate a snippet	⌘D
Copy a snippet's text	⇧⌘C (with its placeholders filled in)
Move a snippet	Drag it onto a folder, or Snippet ▸ Move To
Nest a folder	Drag it onto another folder

Everything saves as you type; there's no Save button. ⌘Z undoes edits, moves and deletes.

Find things

Press ⌘F to search. Search looks at titles and text, ignores case and accents, and understands abbreviations from the start of words, so hmadr finds Home Address. It works the same way as the picker.

Keywords and favorites

In the editor, each snippet has:

• a keyword: a short code like qr or addr. Type it in the picker and that snippet jumps to the top. If two snippets share a keyword, the editor flags it.
• a favorite star. Favorites lead the picker's list, have their own item in the sidebar, and a Favorites section in the menu bar menu.

Write snippets with placeholders

The editor shows a snippet the way it will paste: text is text, and placeholders are highlighted chips. A chip is filled in when you paste; everything else pastes exactly as written.

There are three ways to add a placeholder:

1. Insert Placeholder in the editor's toolbar. The menu lists dates and times, your variables, questions, the clipboard, the cursor position, Tab and Return keys, and your other snippets.
2. Type {{. A completion list of placeholders appears and filters as you type. Return or Tab inserts the chosen one; Esc keeps what you typed as plain text.
3. Type the whole code, like {{date:yyyy-MM-dd}}. It turns into a chip when you type the closing }}. Press ⌘Z right after to keep it as text instead.

Double-click a chip to edit its code. If you change it into something that isn't a placeholder, it becomes plain text; if you clear it, the chip is removed.

The preview under the editor shows the text with every placeholder filled in, and warns you about a {{var:…}} that has no saved value.

Text with braces stays text

Templates like Jinja, Handlebars or JSON often contain {{ … }}. HandyPaste only fills in its own placeholders. Anything else in double braces is left exactly as typed. And text you paste into the editor from another app is always text, so a template pasted in stays a template, even if it happens to contain {{date}}.

Want a placeholder to paste literally?

Type a backslash in front of it: \{{date}} reads and pastes as {{date}} instead of today's date.

The editor doesn't “fix” your text

Smart quotes, smart dashes, autocorrect, text replacement and automatic capitalization are all off in the editor, whatever System Settings say, because a snippet must paste exactly as you wrote it. Spelling is still underlined, since that never changes the text.

Delete and recover

Deleting always asks first, naming what goes. For a folder it says how many snippets go with it.

Deleted snippets move to Recently Deleted in the sidebar, where they stay for 30 days:

• Recover puts a snippet back in its folder, bringing back the folder too if it was deleted with it.
• Delete Immediately… removes it for good. That can't be undone.
• Delete All… empties Recently Deleted.

Recently Deleted syncs through iCloud, so it's the same on every Mac. Deleted snippets don't show up in the picker, the menu bar, search, Shortcuts or exports.

Start with examples

An empty library offers New Snippet, Add Examples and Import Snippets…. Add Examples creates an Examples folder you can learn from and delete later. HandyPaste never adds sample content on its own, because with iCloud sync it would appear again on every Mac.

For more ideas, see Snippet examples.