A free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes app for Mac, plus a Chrome extension. Each is one keystroke away, inside whatever app you are already in. No subscription.
Free forever. Pick your surface, or use all of them. 7 day Pro trial, no card required.
On Windows, Linux or a Chromebook? The free Chrome extension runs everywhere and works in every web app.
You type
The prompt you retype every day, in three characters
Rewrite this to be clearer and shorter.Keep my voice. No bullet points.Return only the rewritten text.
Any block of text you type twice is a snippet
Everything you type, everything you copy, and the markdown vault you already have. Without switching apps once.
Three tools, one app
Every one of them opens on top of whatever you are already in, and anything in one can become something in another.
Snippets
Give any block of text an abbreviation. Type it anywhere and TypeFire replaces it instantly, in every native Mac app and every website.
⌘⌃1search your library
Clips
macOS remembers exactly one thing. TypeFire keeps the rest: text, images, files, and screenshots you can search by the words inside them.
⌘⌃2paste without leaving the app
Notes
Point TypeFire at a folder of markdown, including a real Obsidian vault, and it opens in place. No import, no copy. Free, all of it.
⌘⌃3search your vault from any app
Six things that would otherwise be six separate apps, six Accessibility permissions, and six things to keep updated. Pick one to see it run.
Give any block of text an abbreviation, then type those few characters to expand it in any Mac app. Unlimited, free forever.
Highlight text anywhere, press a shortcut, and rewrite, translate or shorten it in place. Runs on-device if you want.
Put several AI steps behind one shortcut. Summarize, then translate, then reformat, in a single pass.
Everything you copy, kept and searchable, including the text inside screenshots. Free for your 10 most recent clips.
Point TypeFire at the folder of markdown you already have, including a real Obsidian vault, and reach every note from any app. Free, including AI on a note.
⌘⌃\ opens one search box over your snippets, clips and notes at once, from inside whatever app you are in. One ranked list, and the words inside your screenshots are searched with the rest.
All of it in one app, one set of shortcuts, one permission. Free except unlimited clips, note version history, Selection Prompts and Chains, which are the $18 one-time Pro.
Headings, bold, lists and images render as you type while the buffer stays raw markdown, so a note is never rewritten in a different dialect on save. Snippets can be written in Markdown and expand as styled HTML.
Press space on any .md file in Finder and read it rendered, with syntax highlighting, instead of raw source. Every Markdown file on your Mac, not only the ones TypeFire made.
⌘⌃\ searches snippets, clips and notes together, from inside whatever app you are in. One ranked list, screenshots included. Weave adds search by meaning.
{{date}}, {{clipboard}}, {{note:}} and {{cursor}}, substituted as the text expands. Date math takes a format now. A snippet can run JavaScript or AppleScript too.
Screenshots are read on your Mac, so you can find a clip by a word inside it. Auto-delete by age, count or size; pinned clips are always kept.
Apple Notes, Word, RTF and whole folders in as markdown. Snippets from TextExpander, aText and Espanso. The files are yours.
Snippets, notes and clips, across your Macs.
Every save keeps a snapshot you can roll back to. Pro.
Your existing date format, detected.
Summarize, outline, continue or extract tasks.
A clip becomes a note. A note becomes a snippet.
System-wide shortcuts reach snippets, clips and notes from inside any app, and any single snippet can carry a global hotkey of its own.
Work in one folder, personal in another, switched from the sidebar. Point one at a git repo and nothing TypeFire creates ever shows up in git status.
Formatting, colors and inline images, kept intact.
Parchment or slate, on top of light or dark. Six looks from two settings.
Drop {{fill}} in and it asks you for the value.
The graph
Every note, snippet and clip on one canvas. Press `.
No model, no download, nothing to switch on
Yours solid, ours dashed. Never confused.
Then search finds what you meant, not what you typed
You search “contract pricing”
It finds the note that says “the renewal terms are brutal”. Not one shared word.
On your Mac. No account, nothing uploaded.
The Mac text expander is a native app; the Chrome extension is free and works on any operating system, with an iOS keyboard in development. Same snippet library, your choice of surface. JSON export round-trips cleanly between them.
Free or Pro
The deepest integration. Works in every Mac app from Safari to Xcode to Terminal, with global hotkeys, the Spotlight launcher, and iCloud sync.
Free
Works in every web app on any operating system that runs Chromium, including Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS where the Mac app cannot reach.
Coming soon
TypeFire on iPhone and iPad is on the way.
Where people come from
TypeFire runs on the Mac, and the free Chrome extension puts the same snippets on Windows, Linux and ChromeOS.
Grouped by topic. Every answer is on the page.
Still not answered?
Developers use a text expander for boilerplate: imports, license headers, error handling blocks, git commit prefixes, and the SQL and shell commands they type weekly but never remember exactly.
Script snippets extend that further, since a snippet can run JavaScript or AppleScript and paste whatever it returns. Writers and bloggers use it for repeated markup, publication-specific formatting, standard bios, pitch templates, and interview questions.
Support teams use it hardest: canned replies, troubleshooting steps, escalation messages, and closing lines, all paste-ready inside any helpdesk. Sales and outreach teams use it for follow-up sequences, pricing explanations, and meeting-booking language, with dynamic tokens keeping dates correct without editing.
Marketers use it for UTM patterns, campaign briefs, and social copy variants. Everyone else uses it for the boring things: addresses, phone numbers, bank details, wifi passwords, and the email address you have typed ten thousand times.
There are three steps and the whole thing takes about a minute.
First, create a snippet: paste in the block of text you keep retyping, whether that is a signature, a support reply, or a chunk of code. Snippets can be plain text, rich text with formatting and inline images, or Markdown that expands as styled HTML.
Second, assign a trigger. This is the short abbreviation you will type instead, usually two to four characters with a prefix you would never type by accident, such as "zem" or ";sig".
TypeFire warns you if a trigger collides with an existing one. Third, type it anywhere.
TypeFire watches for the trigger through the macOS Accessibility API, deletes the characters you typed, and inserts the full content in their place, in under 50 milliseconds. This works in every native Mac app including Mail, Slack, Notes, Xcode and Figma, and in every website through the free Chrome extension.
If you would rather not memorize an abbreviation, ⌘⌃1 opens a Spotlight-style search across your whole library instead.
Price is the first reason: the text expander is free with no subscription and no snippet limit, where TextExpander is about $40 a year and Typinator is $24.99.
TypeFire's only paid tier is $18 once, and it covers unlimited clipboard clips, Selection Prompts and Prompt Chains rather than the expansion itself. It is a native macOS app written in Swift and Rust rather than an Electron wrapper, so it starts fast and stays out of your memory.
It works in every single app through the Accessibility API, which is the difference between a real text expander and the built-in macOS text replacement that silently fails in Chrome, VS Code and Slack. Beyond expansion, it does things a text expander normally does not: rich text, Markdown and script snippets, AI inside snippets, a Spotlight-style launcher, a full clipboard manager with OCR search built into the same app, and a free Chrome extension so the same library follows you onto any operating system.
That last combination is the real difference. A clipboard manager has no snippet engine, a text expander does not watch your clipboard, and no note app has either, so no other app lets you turn something you copied once into an abbreviation you type forever, or a note you keep rewriting into a snippet.
A text expander is a small utility that watches what you type and replaces short triggers with longer text.
Type "zem" and it instantly expands to your full email address. Type "zsig" and your complete signature drops in.
The point is to stop retyping the same blocks of text dozens of times a day. Most people store between 30 and 200 snippets: email signatures, canned support replies, addresses, common code patterns, meeting templates, slash commands.
Power users build libraries of 500 or more. The technical details matter for which apps it works in. macOS has a built-in text replacement feature, but it only works in native Cocoa text fields.
It silently fails in Chrome, VS Code, Slack, and most cross-platform apps. Dedicated text expanders like TypeFire monitor keystrokes through the Accessibility API, which works everywhere on macOS.
TypeFire watches keystrokes through the macOS Accessibility API, the same low-level system that screen readers and voice control use.
When you type a registered abbreviation, TypeFire detects the match, deletes the abbreviation characters, and pastes the full snippet content. The whole sequence takes under 50 milliseconds, which is faster than your screen can refresh.
You can trigger a snippet three ways. First, by typing an abbreviation like "zem" or "zsig".
Second, by pressing a global keyboard shortcut you assigned to a specific snippet (like Cmd+Shift+E). Third, by opening the Spotlight-style launcher with Cmd+Ctrl+1, typing a few letters, and picking the snippet from a fuzzy-search list.
The Accessibility permission is granted once during setup. TypeFire never sends your keystrokes anywhere. Detection and replacement happen entirely on your Mac.
Yes, for text expansion. The expander is free with no subscription and no feature gates: unlimited snippets, unlimited collections, abbreviation expansion, keyboard shortcuts, the Spotlight-style launcher, rich text editing, Markdown expansion, dynamic tokens, iCloud Sync, JavaScript and AppleScript scripting, AI tokens with five provider options, and the multilingual interface across 8 languages.
Pro is $18 once and covers five features: unlimited clipboard clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync and note version history. The clipboard manager itself works free for your 10 most recent clips.
The cost comparison against paid alternatives is direct. TextExpander charges $40/year on a subscription. aText costs $4.99 but stopped getting updates in 2016.
Typinator is $24.99 as a one-time license. TypeFire's text expander is $0 forever, with an optional $18 one-time Pro tier, distributed through GitHub releases as a notarized macOS binary.
The project runs at near-zero cost because it has no cloud backend. Snippets stay on your Mac. iCloud Sync uses your own iCloud Drive.
AI features use your own API keys. Nothing routes through a TypeFire server.
Yes, three free options. First option: Apple Intelligence.
If you have macOS 26 Tahoe or later on Apple Silicon, Apple Intelligence runs on-device at zero cost. No API key, no usage limit, fully offline.
The model is smaller than the cloud ones but handles rewrite, summarize, and translate well for typical lengths. Second option: Gemini free tier.
Google offers a free tier on the Gemini API with generous daily quotas (currently 15 requests per minute and 1500 requests per day on the standard model). Sign up for an API key at ai.google.dev, paste it into TypeFire settings, done.
For light personal use this rarely hits the limit. Third option: local Ollama.
Install Ollama on your Mac (free, open source), pull an open-source model like Llama 3, Mistral, or Qwen, and point TypeFire's Custom provider at http://localhost:11434. Usage is unlimited, fully offline, nothing leaves your Mac.
The tradeoff is that the model runs on your CPU/GPU so quality and speed depend on your hardware. Most people start with Apple Intelligence if their Mac supports it, then add Gemini or Ollama for power use cases.
TypeFire is free. AI costs depend on which provider you pick.
Free providers. Apple Intelligence (on-device on macOS 26+), Gemini free tier, and local Ollama all cost zero.
These cover most personal use cases without spending anything. Paid providers.
Claude (Anthropic) and OpenAI charge per token. For typical TypeFire use cases rewriting paragraphssummarizing emailstranslating short text, a request costs somewhere between $0.001 and $0.01.
A heavy daily user might spend $1 to $3 per month. Both Claude and OpenAI let you set monthly spending caps on their dashboards, so there is no surprise bill risk.
TypeFire does not mark up AI usage or take any cut. The API key you paste in connects directly to the provider.
Your usage shows up on your provider's billing dashboard, not TypeFire's. The app itself never charges you, never sees your API responses, and has no way to monetize your AI usage even if it wanted to.
Dynamic tokens are placeholders that resolve to live values when a snippet expands.
Eight built-in tokens cover most needs.
{{date}} inserts today's date. {{time}} inserts the current time. {{datetime}} inserts both. Each takes an optional format string like {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} or {{time:HH:mm}} for custom output.
{{clipboard}} pastes whatever is currently on your clipboard. {{cursor}} positions the cursor at a specific spot within the expanded snippet, so you can type immediately at the right place. {{snippet:abbr}} nests one snippet inside another, useful for composable templates.
{{key:tab}} or {{key:return}} simulates a key press, useful for filling form fields. {{nbsp}} inserts a non-breaking space.
Tokens turn static text into context-aware templates. A meeting note template might start with the date filled in, jump the cursor to the attendee list, and end with your sign-off. Without tokens, the same snippet would expand identically every time.
Yes. TypeFire has built-in iCloud Sync that keeps your snippet library in sync across every Mac signed into your Apple ID.
Turn it on once in Settings and your snippets, collections, and tags sync within seconds whenever you make a change. The sync uses your own iCloud Drive, not a TypeFire-operated server.
Sync runs through your own iCloud Drive, protected by your Apple account. TypeFire has no server in the path and never sees the contents of your snippets.
This is different from TextExpander, which routes snippet data through its own cloud infrastructure as part of its subscription service. iCloud Sync is free and unlimited. There is no per-snippet cap, no per-device cap, and no separate fee.
If you have three Macs at home plus a work laptop, all four stay in sync at no cost. The one limitation is that Sync is Mac to Mac today.
An iOS keyboard is in development, with no release date to announce yet. On iOS, text expansion has to run through a custom keyboard rather than system-wide, which is the approach that app takes.
TypeFire supports five distinct snippet content types, each with an editor tuned to that format.
Plain Text is the simplest. Just text, expanded character-for-character with no formatting.
Best for email addresses, short canned phrases, and code snippets where formatting would interfere. Rich Text uses the built-in TipTap editor and supports font family, size, color, highlighting, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, bullet lists, numbered lists, code blocks, images, and links.
Expands as rich text in any app that accepts formatted clipboard content. Markdown lets you write snippets in Markdown source format.
When the snippet expands, TypeFire converts the Markdown to HTML and pastes it as formatted text. The source file stays clean and readable in any text editor.
JavaScript snippets run JavaScript code when triggered and paste the return value. Useful for clipboard transformations, dynamic computation, or generating output that depends on context.
AppleScript snippets work the same way, running AppleScript and pasting the result. Used for macOS automation, controlling other apps, or pulling data from system services. Each content type can also use dynamic tokens like {{date}} and {{clipboard}}.
Yes. TypeFire ships with a full rich text editor built on TipTap, the same WYSIWYG framework used in modern apps like Notion.
The editor supports font family, font size, font color, text highlighting, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, bullet lists, numbered lists, code blocks, inline images, and hyperlinks. When you trigger a rich text snippet, TypeFire writes the formatted content to your clipboard as rich HTML and pastes it.
The result keeps its formatting in any app that accepts rich clipboard content. This works in Mail, Pages, Word, Slack messages, Notion pages, and most other modern apps.
Apps that only accept plain text (Terminal, vim) get the plain text version automatically. For developer-style workflows, TypeFire also supports Markdown snippets.
Write your snippet in Markdown source format and it expands as fully rendered HTML at paste time. The Markdown source stays in your snippet file, which makes diffing and version control easy if you keep your vault in git.
Yes. TypeFire treats variables as dynamic tokens (covered in detail in the dynamic tokens question above).
The practical way to think about variables: any data point that changes by context goes into a token, and TypeFire resolves it at paste time. Common patterns. {{date}} for daily logs and meeting notes. {{clipboard}} for snippets that wrap whatever you just copied (like a Markdown link wrapper, or a console.log of the clipboard content). {{cursor}} for jumping the caret to a fill-in-the-blank position. {{snippet:abbr}} for composing reusable building blocks (your signature inside your email template).
For more dynamic logic than tokens cover, JavaScript snippets give you full programming capability. You can read the clipboard, transform it, query system data, and paste a computed result.
AppleScript snippets do the same with deeper access to other Mac apps. The token system covers maybe 80 percent of cases. Script snippets cover the rest.
Yes. TypeFire works in every Mac app that accepts text input.
This includes native apps like Safari, Mail, Notes, Pages, and Numbers, plus Chromium-based browsers ChromeEdgeBraveArc, Electron apps VS CodeSlackDiscordNotionFigmaLinear, terminal emulators (Terminal, iTerm, Warp), Microsoft Office, JetBrains IDEs, and any other text-input surface. Why this works universally: macOS Accessibility APIs sit underneath the application layer, so they see keystrokes regardless of what framework the app is built on.
Apple's built-in text replacement feature, by contrast, only works in native Cocoa text fields and silently fails in everything else. Setup is a one-time grant of the Accessibility permission.
No per-app configuration, no extensions to install in browsers, no plugins for editors. The abbreviation you typed, the keyboard shortcut you bound, and the Spotlight-style launcher all work the moment you switch focus to any app.
TypeFire supports macOS 12 Monterey and every release since.
That covers macOS 13 Ventura, macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, and macOS 26 Tahoe. Each major macOS release gets tested before TypeFire ships.
TypeFire runs on macOS 12 Monterey and later. There is no bundled browser runtime, which keeps installs lean and startup fast.
Apple Intelligence features in TypeFire require macOS 26 Tahoe or later, since that is when Apple shipped the on-device foundation models. On older macOS versions, the rest of the AI provider integrations ClaudeOpenAIGeminiOllama work normally. Every other TypeFire feature works on all supported macOS versions.
TypeFire's interface is fully translated into 8 languages: English, Spanish (español), French (français), Portuguese Brazil (português brasileiro), German (Deutsch), Italian (italiano), Dutch (Nederlands), and Russian (русский).
Every UI surface is localized, not just menu labels. That includes the sidebar, the snippet editor, settings panels, the Spotlight-style launcher, onboarding flow, error messages, and notifications.
Roughly 800 strings per locale. To switch languages, open Settings, go to Appearance, and pick a language from the dropdown.
TypeFire restarts to apply the new language and remembers your choice across launches. On first launch, TypeFire defaults to your macOS system language if it matches one of the eight supported locales.
Snippet content itself can be any language and any script CyrillicCJKRTLemoji. The localization is for the app interface specifically. If you write Russian snippets while running TypeFire in English, both work fine together.
Yes. TypeFire has AI tokens you drop into any snippet.
The built-in tokens are {{ai:rewrite}}, {{ai:summarize}}, {{ai:translate:fr}} (or any language code), {{ai:fix}} for grammar, and {{ai:custom:your-prompt}} for arbitrary prompts. Drop one of these into a snippet, bind the snippet to a shortcut, and the AI runs against your current text selection or clipboard contents.
Five AI provider integrations are supported. Apple Intelligence runs on-device on macOS 26 Tahoe or later, costs nothing, and works fully offline.
Claude (Anthropic), OpenAI (ChatGPT), and Gemini (Google) use your own API keys for cloud-based requests. The Custom provider option accepts any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, which covers local model servers like Ollama and LM Studio, plus hosted gateways like Groq, OpenRouter, and Together.
A typical example. Highlight a paragraph you wrote, press your shortcut, and the AI rewrites it.
Or copy a long thread, type {{ai:summarize}}, and a TL;DR pastes back. Whatever the result is, it lands directly in the app you were typing in, no copy-paste back and forth.
The biggest difference is the pricing model. TextExpander costs $40 per year on a subscription that automatically renews.
TypeFire is free forever with no subscription. For an individual user that adds up to roughly $400 in TextExpander fees over a decade for the same core feature set.
Beyond cost, the technical differences favor TypeFire on a Mac specifically. TypeFire is a native macOS app built with Swift and Rust, which compiles to a small native binary.
TextExpander is built on Electron and runs a bundled Chromium runtime, so it uses more memory and CPU than a comparable native app. TypeFire also stores snippets as plain Markdown files in a folder you choose, so there is no vendor lock-in.
TextExpander stores in its proprietary cloud database. Feature-wise, both handle abbreviation expansion and global shortcuts well.
TypeFire adds Markdown expansion (write in Markdown, expand as formatted HTML), AI tokens with five provider integrations, JavaScript and AppleScript scripting, and a Spotlight-style launcher. TextExpander's main advantage is team collaboration features for workplaces, which TypeFire does not offer.
Yes. TypeFire is built around a privacy-first design.
Snippet content stays on your Mac as plain Markdown files in a folder you choose. The app never reads, transmits, or stores your snippet contents on any server.
Keystroke monitoring happens entirely on your device through the macOS Accessibility API. TypeFire sees the characters you type to detect abbreviations, but those keystrokes are processed in memory and discarded immediately.
They are never logged, transmitted, or persisted. The Accessibility permission is the only system permission TypeFire requests.
No Input Monitoring permission is required. Telemetry is anonymous.
Anonymous counts of active installs and expansion totals, without identifying individual users. No Mixpanel, no third-party tracking pixels, no personal data of any kind.
The one piece of personal info we do touch is your email, which you provide during signup to verify the install. Email is stored in a Google Sheet for usage tracking and is never shared. iCloud Sync, when enabled, routes through your own iCloud Drive.
Sync runs through your own iCloud Drive, protected by your Apple account. TypeFire has no server in the path and never sees your snippets.
The best free text expander for Mac and Chrome, with a clipboard manager and your markdown notes in the same app. Create snippets, auto-expand text anywhere, and reach your whole vault from a keystroke. Stop typing the same things over and over.
Free forever · Mac app + Chrome extension · No subscription