snipkit

A fast terminal snippet manager. Save shell one-liners and code snippets, then fuzzy-search and paste them back without ever leaving the terminal. Everything lives in a local file — no accounts, no sync server, no telemetry.

Why

I kept re-deriving the same ffmpeg, jq, and git incantations, or digging through shell history hoping I'd typed one recently. snipkit is the little tool I wanted: type three letters, get the command, paste it. That's it.

Features

• Fuzzy search with an acronym-friendly ranker — gco finds git checkout.
• Two local backends: a human-readable JSON document, or SQLite when you want indexing. Switch with a flag or an environment variable.
• Clipboard integration on macOS (pbcopy), Wayland (wl-copy), X11 (xclip/xsel), and Windows (clip).
• Interactive picker that uses fzf when it's available and falls back to a numbered prompt otherwise.
• Shell key bindings for bash, zsh, and fish — bind a key and drop a snippet straight onto the command line.
• Import / export as plain JSON, so your snippets are yours to move around.
• Zero network. snipkit never opens a socket.

Install

$ go install github.com/realmaxc/snipkit/cmd/snipkit@latest

Or build from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/realmaxc/snipkit
$ cd snipkit
$ make build      # produces ./snipkit

Quick start

$ echo 'git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all' | \
    snipkit add -title "git graph" -lang sh -tag git

$ snipkit list
ID        LANG  TAGS  TITLE
k3f9a1b2  sh    git   git graph

$ snipkit search gitgraph
ID        LANG  TAGS  TITLE
k3f9a1b2  sh    git   git graph

$ snipkit copy k3f      # id prefixes work too
copied k3f9a1b2 to clipboard

Storage & configuration

By default snipkit keeps a JSON store at $XDG_DATA_HOME/snipkit/snippets.json (falling back to ~/.local/share/snipkit/snippets.json).

Setting	Env var	Flag	Default
Store path	SNIPKIT_DB	--db	.../snipkit/snippets.json
Backend	SNIPKIT_BACKEND	--backend	json
Editor	SNIPKIT_EDITOR, VISUAL, EDITOR	—	vi

$ snipkit --backend sqlite --db ~/snips.db list

Shell integration

Bind Ctrl+S to the interactive picker — see examples/shell/. For bash:

source /path/to/snipkit/examples/shell/bash-widget.sh

Documentation

• Usage guide
• CLI reference
• Architecture
• Design notes

License

MIT © Max Collins