Some clips you paste once. Others — a canned reply, a code snippet, the address you retype into every form — you paste every week. Inline shortcuts are Pastea's answer: give a clip a short name like ;welcome, and typing that name in any app replaces it with the clip.

Creating one

Right-click a clip in the panel and choose Add Inline Shortcut, then give it a name. From that moment, typing the trigger anywhere — your mail client, Slack, a code editor — erases what you just typed and pastes the clip in its place.

Every shortcut you've created is listed in Settings → Inline shortcuts, where you can rename or remove it. The leading character is yours to change too: if ; clashes with how you type, pick a different prefix in the same settings page.

They work with every kind of clip

A shortcut isn't limited to plain text. Point one at a formatted snippet and the formatting comes along; point one at an image and typing the trigger drops in the picture. Whatever pasting the clip by hand would have produced, the shortcut produces.

What Pastea watches, and what it doesn't

Inline shortcuts need the same Accessibility permission that ordinary pasting uses — expanding a shortcut is a paste. Two things worth knowing about how it behaves:

• The keyboard is only watched while at least one shortcut exists. No shortcuts, no observation.
• Keystrokes are never stored. Pastea only matches what you type against the trigger names you created.

Secure input fields — password boxes — are handled by macOS itself: they don't deliver keystrokes to apps like Pastea, so nothing can expand there.

A few names that earn their keep

• ;sig — your email signature, formatting intact
• ;addr — the postal address you keep retyping into forms
• ;repro — the bug-report template your team asks for
• ;cal — the scheduling link you send ten times a week

One caution, straight from our own privacy guidance: your history lives in plain form on your Mac, so passwords, credentials, and financial details belong in a password manager, not in a standing clip.

Pinning the clip (or filing it into a list) isn't required — a clip with a shortcut is kept beyond your retention window automatically, because a trigger is a standing promise.

More questions? The help centre covers shortcuts alongside everything else.