FastPrompter

A tiny, portable scratchpad & snippet manager for Windows

One hotkey. Instant window. Your prompts, notes and drafts — always one keystroke away.

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Press Alt+X anywhere — in your browser, IDE, terminal — and FastPrompter pops up at your cursor with everything you keep: auto-saved scratchpads (silos), reusable snippets on F1–F10, per-project tabs, and an archive. Press Esc, it vanishes. Everything lives in one folder, saved in real time. No cloud, no accounts, no telemetry.

✨ What it does

🗄️ Silos	Up to 100 auto-saved scratch slots per project — kill the app, your text survives
📋 Snippets	Named text blocks, pasted instantly with F1–F10
🗂️ Projects	5 independent tabs, each with its own silos, snippets and archive
📦 Archive	One click stores the current silo or snippet out of the way
📌 Pin & tint	Hover a silo for pin/archive buttons; silos tint by how recently you edited them
🖱️ Wheel everything	Wheel flips pages & switches tabs, Ctrl+wheel walks silos or zooms text
✍️ Markdown editor	Live highlighting, real checkboxes, auto-bullets, --- dividers, Ctrl+E headers with timestamp
🦓 Readability	Zebra stripes, line numbers with clickable margin marks, word wrap, zen mode
🎨 6 vintage themes	Win95-style bevels, warm amber-on-black, OLED — plus a full custom color editor
🎵 Sounds	Optional UI clicks and a typewriter tick, with volume control
📄 Drop any file	Drag ~50 text-based file types into the editor — loads as plain text
↩️ Undo everything	Ctrl+Z covers text and silo operations (clear, delete, move)

📸 Screenshots

More screenshots

🚀 Quick start

Portable EXE — grab it from Releases, run it, press Alt+X. No install, no Python, no admin rights. The database lives in a data/ folder next to the EXE — run it from a USB stick if you like.

From source:

git clone https://github.com/vacterro/FastPrompter.git
cd FastPrompter
uv sync && uv run python FastPrompter.pyw    # or: pip install -r requirements.txt

Build your own EXE (~26 MB — unused Qt modules are stripped):

python tools/build.py

⌨️ Shortcuts

Global (rebindable, two slots each): Alt+X / F15 toggle window · Shift+Alt+X quick list · Alt+D sidebar · Ctrl+Shift+L lock window · Ctrl+Shift+E always on top

In-app keys

Key	Action
Ctrl+N	New empty silo
Alt+Up / Alt+Down	Previous / next silo
Ctrl+1–Ctrl+0	Jump to silo 1–10
F1–F10	Paste snippet 1–10
Ctrl+S	Save / update snippet
Ctrl+W	Insert --- divider line
Ctrl+E	Header + timestamp on current line
Ctrl+Return	Toggle checkboxes
Ctrl+B / I / U	Bold / Italic / Underline
Ctrl+F / Ctrl+H	Find / Replace
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z	Undo / Redo (text and silo actions)
Ctrl+Q	Cycle window through screen corners
Ctrl+D	Focus (zen) mode
Ctrl+Shift+S	Export silo to file
Esc	Close search → hide & save
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q	Quit completely

Mouse gestures

Gesture	Action
Wheel over silos / snippets / archive	Flip pages
Ctrl+wheel over silos	Select previous / next silo
Wheel over tab bar	Switch project
Ctrl+wheel in editor	Zoom font
Middle-click a silo	Clear it (already empty → delete the slot)
Hover a silo	📌 pin / 📥 archive buttons appear
Right-click a silo	Transfer to project, replace from, move to bottom…
Drag a silo between others / onto one	Reorder / swap

📁 Your data

Everything is local and yours:

• Database — data/local_data_v15.db next to the EXE, saved in real time
• Markdown mirror — silos, snippets & archive exported daily as plain .md files to Documents\.fastprompter\ (on by default, toggleable), readable without FastPrompter
• Crash log — written next to the EXE; crashes are loud, never silent

🛠️ Under the hood

Python 3.11 + PyQt6, SQLite via the standard library, Win32 RegisterHotKey for global hotkeys, Nuitka for the single-file EXE. Sounds use QSoundEffect with a stdlib winsound fallback, which keeps the FFmpeg payload (~100 MB) out of the build entirely.

uv run pytest tests/         # 461 unit tests
uv run pytest tests_smoke/   # 27 integration tests — boots the real app offscreen

📜 License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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_{Built with Python, PyQt6 and ❤️ by vacterro}