snipv

A tiny Windows tray app for pasting text snippets anywhere with global hotkeys.

Define a snippet, record a shortcut for it, and from then on pressing that shortcut in any application pastes the snippet at the cursor (clipboard + synthesized Ctrl+V). Built with .NET MAUI (WinUI 3).

Taking a global hotkey is not free: on some keyboard layouts the combination you pick is one the layout itself uses to type a character. snipv asks Windows what every installed layout types with AltGr, and warns you before a shortcut costs you a key.

The name is snip + V, as in Ctrl+V - the shortcut it presses for you.

Features

• Global hotkeys - work regardless of which application has focus (RegisterHotKey + WM_HOTKEY via window subclassing).

• Shortcut recorder - click the shortcut field and press the combination; no typing needed.

• Shortcut safety policy - refuses combinations that are not yours to take: the everyday Ctrl+letter shortcuts (copy, paste, save, find, undo and the rest), the near-universal Ctrl+Shift ones (Esc, T, N, P, V, C, F), Alt+F4, and anything whose only modifier is Shift or Win. A combination with a single modifier that survives the list is still only accepted with a warning, since those collide with in-app shortcuts everywhere. Before saving, snipv also probes whether another application already holds the combination globally, by registering it for real and releasing it again.

• Keyboard layout aware - AltGr is not a modifier of its own: the layout driver holds a virtual Ctrl alongside it, so Windows sees AltGr as Ctrl+Alt and AltGr+Shift as Ctrl+Alt+Shift. The probe asks each installed layout what it types that way (GetKeyboardLayoutList for the layouts, ToUnicodeEx with Ctrl+Alt held for the characters), and the policy warns off exactly those combinations. Nothing about it is language-specific: a Polish layout reports characters such as ł ó ż, a German one @ € µ, a US one nothing at all. The warning names the character at stake and can be overruled, since you are the one who can tell when the probe got it wrong. A dead key counts as taken as well: it composes an accent with the next keystroke rather than typing a character itself, so the warning can only say that a character is at stake.

• A shortcut that costs you a key says so - the check runs when a shortcut is saved, so a snippet can predate it or be overtaken by a keyboard layout installed later. Those rows carry the character they swallow, next to the shortcut. Shift is part of the answer, because the layout types the capital with AltGr+Shift:

  

• Multi-line snippets - signatures, code fragments, canned replies.

• Editing - select a snippet on the list to edit its text or shortcut, or clear the shortcut to keep the text without a hotkey.

• No snippet is deleted behind your back - before a shortcut changes hands the dialog shows what that shortcut currently pastes, and the snippet losing it stays on the list marked "no shortcut" instead of disappearing. Removing a snippet is the only thing that deletes text, and it asks first.

• Tray app - closing the window hides it to the notification area; the icon's left click restores it, right click offers Show/Exit.

• Single instance - launching a second copy just brings the running one back to front.

• Autostart - optional "Start with Windows (hidden in tray)" checkbox; managed via an HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run entry that launches snipv.exe --tray.

• Window geometry - position and size come back with the app. A rectangle that no longer lands on a connected monitor is ignored rather than restored, and restoring from the tray pulls a window back onto the screen if the monitor it lived on has been unplugged meanwhile.

• Persistence - snippets live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\snipv\snippets.json (a fixed path, independent of the app identity) as a list of { "Shortcut": ..., "Content": ... } entries. Writes go through a temporary file and an atomic move, a file that cannot be parsed is renamed to snippets.json.corrupt rather than overwritten, and a change that cannot be written at all is reported instead of looking saved until the next start.

Known limitations

• Elevated (admin) windows: Windows blocks synthesized input from a normal process into an elevated one (UIPI), so the automatic Ctrl+V never reaches e.g. an admin terminal. The snippet is still placed on the clipboard, so a manual Ctrl+V works.
• Pasting goes through the clipboard and the snippet intentionally stays there afterwards (no clipboard restore).

Recommended shortcut pools

Pool	Notes
Ctrl+Alt+F1-F12	Always free; function keys never type a character
Ctrl+Alt+0-9	Free unless your layout puts a character on AltGr+digit
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+letter	Free unless your layout types that letter with AltGr+Shift

snipv warns about the exceptions and names the character at stake, so you can also just record a combination and see what it says.

While snipv runs, its hotkeys win over in-app shortcuts of other programs - that is what the safety policy protects against.

Tests

Unit (shortcut policy, keyboard layout probe, snippet storage):

dotnet test tests/snipv.Tests

End-to-end - drives the real app through UI Automation, the real keyboard and the clipboard, in eight steps: adds a snippet (recording Ctrl+Alt+F9), fires the global hotkey, checks the reserved-shortcut block, hands the shortcut to a second snippet and checks that the first one is kept without one, edits the snippet and fires the hotkey again, removes it, and verifies close-to-tray plus the single-instance behavior.

1. Build the version under test first:

   dotnet build -c Release
   

2. Run the script:

   powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tests\e2e\run-e2e.ps1
   

Notes:

• Don't touch the mouse or keyboard while it runs (~1 minute) - it sends real key chords and moves window focus.
• It stops any running snipv first, clears out anything an earlier failed run left behind, and cleans up its test snippet and your clipboard afterwards.
• Exit code 0 means every assertion passed; failures are listed at the end.
• To test a different build, pass -ExePath <path\to\snipv.exe>.

Building

Requires the .NET 10 SDK with the MAUI workload on Windows:

dotnet build snipv.csproj

The exe lands in bin\Debug\net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0\win-x64\snipv.exe (unpackaged, WindowsPackageType=None).

Note: if you move the exe (e.g. publish a Release build), re-tick the autostart checkbox so the registry entry points at the new path.

License

MIT

Third-party notices

• Open Sans (Resources/Fonts/*.ttf) - copyright Google, licensed under the Apache License 2.0; see LICENSE-OpenSans.txt.