Capture into your vault without opening Obsidian.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Obsidian
The specific reasons people give for switching.
The problem is not capture, it is reconciling
Almost nobody leaves Obsidian over this. They keep it for thinking and route capture to Apple Notes or a dedicated capture app, and then the two never get merged. TypeFire writes into the vault Obsidian is already reading, so there is only ever one inbox.
One keystroke, from anywhere
Control Command Shift N opens a capture window on top of whatever you are doing. Type the thought, hit save, and you are back where you were. The main window never opens.
No plugin chain to maintain
Getting sophisticated capture in Obsidian usually means QuickAdd, Templater and a launcher script, each of which can break on an update. This is built in.
Daily notes that match your convention
TypeFire detects the date format your vault already uses instead of imposing one, so capture lands in the journal you already keep rather than starting a parallel one. Control Command Shift D opens today's note.
Search everything you captured, from anywhere
Control Command Shift K searches the whole vault from an overlay, and Enter pastes the note into the document you are typing in.
It writes plain markdown
A captured note is a .md file in your vault, indistinguishable from one you wrote in Obsidian. Nothing is held in a database you cannot read.
TypeFire compared with Obsidian
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Obsidian | |
|---|---|---|
| Capture without opening the app | Built in | Plugins |
| Plugins required | None | QuickAdd, Templater |
| Global capture hotkey | Yes | Via plugin or script |
| Writes into your existing vault | Yes | Yes |
| Second inbox to reconcile | No | Usually |
| Daily note convention | Auto-detected | Configured |
| Price | Free | Free |
Where Obsidian is genuinely better
Three things Obsidian does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Obsidian.
Capture on a phone
Obsidian has iOS and Android apps, and most capture happens away from a desk. TypeFire is a Mac app, so a phone thought still needs Obsidian mobile or something else.
Templater is genuinely powerful
If your capture runs a template with prompts, dates and computed fields, that plugin chain does things TypeFire's capture window does not.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Obsidian at any price.
Capture in one keystroke
No window switch, no app launch, no plugin. Control Command Shift N and it is in the vault.
Search and paste from anywhere
The same vault, one hotkey away, pasted into whatever app you are in.
Snippets inside your notes
Abbreviations expand while you write, in a note or anywhere else on the Mac.
A clipboard manager alongside
Everything you copied, searchable by the text inside screenshots, promotable to a snippet.
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. Clipboard managers have no snippet engine, text expanders do not watch your clipboard, and no note app has either, which is why the loop only closes here.
- 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 database, owner-only files
Clips are stored in an encrypted SQLite database on your Mac. The key is generated on your machine and kept in the macOS Keychain. Image files sit alongside the database with owner-only permissions.
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.
Moving from Obsidian
Still not answered?
Install TypeFire, point it at your Obsidian vault, and press Control Command Shift N from any app.
A small capture window appears on top of your work, and what you type is saved as a markdown file in that vault. Obsidian picks it up automatically because it is the same folder. TypeFire's main window never opens.
No. Quick capture is built into TypeFire, so there is no plugin to install, configure or keep working across updates.
QuickAdd remains more powerful for template-driven capture with prompts and computed fields; TypeFire's capture is deliberately a fast plain-text box.
Into the notes folder you chose when you pointed TypeFire at the vault, as a plain .md file.
If your vault uses daily notes, TypeFire detects the date convention already in use and can append to today's note rather than creating a new one.
Yes. TypeFire writes directly to the markdown files, so Obsidian does not need to be running.
When you next open Obsidian the notes are simply there.
Yes. Quick capture, the notes vault, the global overlay, daily notes, wikilinks, backlinks and AI on notes are all free in TypeFire.
Pro is $18 once and adds notes sync, version history and the clipboard features.
Stop keeping two inboxes.
Capture straight into the vault you already have, from wherever you are. Free, and it never rewrites a file you did not edit.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets