Your vault, on top of whatever you are doing.
How do I open my Obsidian vault with a global hotkey on Mac?
Obsidian has no system wide hotkey for searching your vault from another app. TypeFire adds one: press Command Control 3 anywhere in macOS to search every note and press Return to paste it where you were typing.
It reads your existing vault in place, so nothing moves and Obsidian keeps working on the same files.
Why people move from Obsidian
The specific reasons people give for switching.
See how your vault connects, without setting anything up
TypeFire 5.0 draws every note, snippet and clip on one canvas, built from the links, tags and folders already in the vault Obsidian reads. It needs no model and no download, and it cannot be switched off. A connection you made is drawn solid and one TypeFire worked out is drawn dashed, so the two are never confused. Turn on Weave and search starts matching what you meant rather than the exact words you typed. Free, including for people who already bought.
The switcher, without the switch
⌘⌃3 opens a Spotlight-style overlay on top of the app you are in. Type a few characters, see your whole vault filtered, press Enter, and the note's text lands in the document you were writing. Escape puts you back at the same cursor.
You never lose your place
Focus returns to the exact field you left, so a mid-sentence lookup does not cost you the sentence. That is the difference between checking a note and abandoning what you were doing.
It searches the vault, not an index of it
Two-tier search over the same markdown files Obsidian reads. A 10,000 note vault lists in 214 milliseconds on a release build, so the overlay stays instant at real vault sizes.
Three things behind one key
The same overlay carries notes, your clipboard history and your snippets. ⌘⌃3 for notes, V for clips, T for snippets.
No plugin, no launcher script
Getting anything like this in Obsidian means a launcher, a URI scheme and some scripting, and it still only opens Obsidian rather than pasting where you are.
TypeFire compared with Obsidian
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Obsidian | |
|---|---|---|
| Search notes from inside another app | Yes | No |
| Paste a note where you are typing | Yes | Copy and switch back |
| Returns focus to your cursor | Yes | n/a |
| Quick Switcher inside the app | Yes | Yes, excellent |
| Works with Obsidian closed | Yes | No |
| Setup required | Point at the vault | Launcher plus scripting |
Where Obsidian is genuinely better
Three things Obsidian does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Obsidian.
The Quick Switcher is genuinely great
Inside Obsidian, it is one of the best implementations of the pattern anywhere, with aliases, headings and block references. TypeFire's overlay searches note titles and content and does not go that deep.
Plugins can extend search
Omnisearch and similar give Obsidian fuzzy full-text search with ranking that TypeFire does not attempt to match.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Obsidian at any price.
System-wide, not app-wide
The hotkey works in every application on the Mac, not only when Obsidian has focus.
Paste, not just open
Enter puts the text into the document you were already in, rather than bringing another window forward.
Capture on the same principle
⌘⌃⇧N writes a new note without opening anything.
Clips and snippets on the same key
One muscle memory for notes, clipboard history and text expansion.
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.
A clipboard manager you can tell what to ignore
A clipboard manager sees everything you copy. Until 4.0 the only control over that was a password-manager exclusion you could not see. There are three now, none of them gated, and the limits of the strongest one are stated rather than buried.
Turn image capture off
One switch. Text keeps being captured and pictures stop. Images you have already saved are kept rather than deleted, which is not what most people expect a privacy toggle to do, so it is worth saying.
Name apps to skip
Add any application and TypeFire ignores what you copy in it. Choose from the apps it has already seen, with clip counts, or browse to any app on your Mac. Each app gets one of three settings: allow it, block images only, or block everything you copy there. The middle one is what most people want for a work tool, keeping the text and losing the screenshots.
The password managers, now visible
TypeFire has always ignored password managers. That list is in Settings now, twenty-three apps including 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Dashlane and Apple Passwords, blocked by bundle ID in code rather than by a setting you have to find. It shows which of them you have installed, and any one can be overridden.
Encrypted on your Mac
Clips are stored in an encrypted database on your Mac. The key is generated on your machine and kept in the macOS Keychain. Images sit beside it, readable only by your own account.
Secrets expire in minutes
Card numbers and high-entropy strings are detected and deleted after five minutes by default, adjustable in Settings. Everything else follows the retention you choose.
An on-device AI option
Apple Intelligence and local models through Ollama or LM Studio run entirely on your machine. If you pick Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini instead, text goes to that provider directly; TypeFire operates no server in that path.
Where blocking by app stops being a guarantee
macOS does not tell an application which other application wrote to the clipboard. TypeFire matches on the app that was in front at the time, plus any app that identifies itself using the standard convention. That covers the overwhelming majority of real cases and it is not absolute. The protection that does not depend on a guess is the concealed-content marker: password managers mark what they copy, and TypeFire never stores it whatever else is set.
The app list also covers what you copy, not screenshots you save as a file. A PNG on your desktop records nothing about what was on screen, so TypeFire matches those to an app where it can and skips them when it does. It is right in the ordinary case and it is not a promise: to keep saved screenshots out entirely, turn off Save screenshots to Clips.
Eighteen dollars. Once.
TypeFire Pro is a single payment that unlocks unlimited clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync and note version history. 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
Subscription, forever
Two months of Paste, or all of TypeFire.
The graph is free, and it needs nothing
Press ` and TypeFire draws every note, snippet and clip on one canvas, using the links, tags and folders already in your files. Nothing to download and nothing to switch on. A connection you made is drawn solid, one TypeFire worked out is drawn dashed.
Turn on Weave and search starts matching what you meant rather than the exact words you typed. It runs on your Mac, with no account and nothing uploaded.
Moving from Obsidian
Still not answered?
Install TypeFire, point it at your Obsidian vault folder, and press ⌘⌃3 from any application.
An overlay appears on top of your current app with every note in the vault searchable. This works whether or not Obsidian is running, because TypeFire reads the same markdown files directly.
Yes, in one important way. The Quick Switcher is excellent but only works while you are inside Obsidian, so reaching it means leaving what you were doing.
TypeFire's overlay opens on top of whatever app you are in and can paste the note into the document you are already typing in, then return focus to your cursor.
Yes. ⌘⌃3 is the default for the notes overlay, N for quick capture and D for today's daily note, and all three are re-recordable in TypeFire's settings.
No. A 10,000 note vault lists in 214 milliseconds on a release build, measured against a two second budget.
The list is windowed and search runs in two tiers.
Yes. TypeFire reads and writes the markdown files directly, so Obsidian does not need to be running for search, capture or paste to work.
One key, from anywhere.
Point TypeFire at your vault and press ⌘⌃3 in any app. Free, and Obsidian keeps working exactly as it does now.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌘⌃2 your clips⌘⌃1 your snippets