A clipboard manager and text expander
in one app
Repetition comes in two shapes
Two problems that are usually sold as two products.
Text you already know
Your email signature, a canned reply, a code block, a set of bank details. You know what it says; typing it again is the waste. That is a text expander: give it zsig and it appears.
Text you just had
A tracking number from an email, a hex value from Figma, a URL you copied and then overwrote. You do not know it, you had it. That is a clipboard manager: press ⌘⌃2 and it is back.
The connection everyone misses is that the second turns into the first. Something you have copied three times is not a clip any more, it is a snippet you have not created yet. Only an app that does both can notice that and act on it.
Turn anything you copy into something you type
Right-click a clip, choose Save as snippet, give it an abbreviation. The thing you copied once becomes something you type three characters to get, forever. The same conversions run across all three surfaces: a clip becomes a note, and a note you keep rewriting becomes a snippet. Snippets, clips and notes live in one app, which is what makes each of those a single click rather than an export and an import.
- 01
Copy something
It lands in Clips alongside everything else you copied today.
- 02
Save as snippet
It leaves your rolling history and enters your permanent library.
- 03
Give it a trigger
Type
invfrom then on and never look it up again.
What running two apps actually costs
Money is the easiest part to count.
Two subscriptions or two purchases
TextExpander at $60 a year plus Paste at $3.99 a month is roughly $108 a year, every year. TypeFire is $18 once, and the free tier covers a lot of people permanently.
Two Accessibility permissions
Both categories need deep system access on macOS. That is two apps you are trusting with keystroke observation or pasteboard access, two things to re-grant after an OS update, and two attack surfaces.
Two places to look
You remember you saved something. Was it a snippet or a clip? Which app? With one library and one search you stop asking.
Neither can talk to the other
The most useful move available, promoting a repeated clip into a permanent abbreviation, is impossible across an app boundary. It only exists if one app owns both.
Two menu bar icons and two update cycles
Small, but it is the kind of small that adds up when both apps are background utilities you never think about until one breaks.
Two sets of settings to keep in sync
Which apps to exclude, which shortcuts to use, which providers to configure. Doing it twice means doing it inconsistently.
Everything from both categories
Both halves are complete, not one bolted onto the other.
A real text expander
Unlimited snippets, abbreviations that fire in every Mac app and every website, collections and tags, rich text and Markdown, dynamic tokens for dates and clipboard contents, nested snippets, per-snippet hotkeys, and script snippets in JavaScript and AppleScript. Free and uncapped.
A real clipboard manager
Text, images, files, links, and colors, with on-device OCR so screenshots are searchable by the text inside them. Filter by source app, pin, tag, rename, and paste without leaving the field. Free for your 10 most recent clips.
One search across both
⌘⌃1 searches your snippets and, on Pro, your clips too. Snippets first, then matching clips with thumbnails and previews.
AI in both directions
AI tokens inside snippets, AI actions on clips, and Selection Prompts that rewrite highlighted text in place in any app. Apple Intelligence or a local model keeps it on-device.
One permission, one app, one update
A single Accessibility grant covers expansion and pasting. One menu bar icon. One thing to keep current.
A Chrome extension for the rest
Your snippets follow you into every web app on any operating system, including Windows and ChromeOS. Free, no paid tier.
Eighteen dollars. Once.
TypeFire Pro is a single payment that unlocks unlimited clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync, note version history and saving from AI apps through MCP. There is no subscription and no per-seat pricing.
Free tier, then one payment
No free tier at all
One time
No free tier
One time
Lifetime, or $3.99/mo
Five snippets free, then a subscription
A text expander and a clipboard manager, for less than one month of the two-app alternative.
Two tools, one app
Still not answered?
A text expander handles text you already know: you give a block of text an abbreviation, type the abbreviation, and the full text appears.
Your email signature, a canned reply, a code block. A clipboard manager handles text you just had: it records what you copy so you can get back something you copied five copies ago.
You do not know that text by heart, you had it a minute ago. The two feel like separate problems, which is why they are usually sold separately, but they meet in the middle: anything you have copied three or four times is a snippet you have not created yet.
A few, and they are mostly small and new: Text Catalyst, Quip, and SnippetCraft each combine clipboard history with some form of text expansion.
The more common setup is two apps, typically TextExpander or Typinator paired with Paste, Maccy, or Raycast. What is unusual about TypeFire is the direction it came from: it shipped as a text expander first and added the clipboard manager in v3.0, so the snippet engine underneath is a full one rather than a simple saved-text list, and a promoted clip inherits all of it.
It is one native Mac binary rather than Electron, and the two halves share most of their machinery: one storage layer, one search index, one settings screen, one Accessibility permission, one paste path.
The alternative is genuinely heavier: two background apps, two permission grants, two update cycles, and two menu bar icons. If you only want one of the two, the other stays out of your way, and Clips in particular does not even start recording until you explicitly enable it.
The common paid pairing is TextExpander at $60 a year plus Paste at $3.99 a month, which is about $108 a year, forever.
TypeFire is free for unlimited text expansion plus 10 recent clips, and $18 once if you want unlimited clips and the AI prompt features. Even the cheaper pairings are more: Typinator at $24.99 plus ClipBook at $9.99 is $35 before you have typed anything, and neither of them can promote a clip into a snippet.
Yes, and quite a lot of people do. Clips is off until you turn it on, deliberately: an app that watches your clipboard should be something you switch on rather than something you discover is already running.
The text expander works fully without it and is free and uncapped. You can enable Clips later from Settings if you change your mind, and turn it back off at any point.
Right-click any clip and choose Save as snippet.
It leaves your rolling clipboard history and enters your permanent library, where you give it an abbreviation. From then on you type those characters instead of going to look for it.
Because there is a complete snippet engine underneath, the promoted clip gets everything a snippet gets: it can live in a collection, carry tags, contain dynamic tokens, have its own global hotkey, and sync to your other Macs through iCloud. That last part is why the loop matters: the clip stops being local and transient and becomes something you own.
Expansion works in every native macOS app through the Accessibility API, with a clipboard-paste fallback for web apps and Electron apps, which covers Slack, Notion, VS Code, and browsers.
Quick Paste inserts into whatever field you were last typing in. For websites specifically, the free Chrome extension is the more reliable path and it works on Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS too. The clipboard manager itself is Mac-only.
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