Snippets, bookmarks and conversions
Everything on Sidekick’s menu is data. The menu is built when Sidekick starts from data\menu.json, a file that stays on your machine, and the Library Editor changes it without touching the program.
Snippets
Text inserted at the cursor: boilerplate, standard replies, special characters, regex patterns, dictionary citations. The starter set has an HTML section, twenty-eight special characters (en and em dashes, arrows, primes, accented vowels, subscripts and superscripts, non-breaking space, ™ ® © and so on) and a couple of regex patterns. Pick one from the menu or type its name into the palette.
Bookmarks
Web addresses and local files or folders you keep reopening: forums, documentation, reference sites, client folders.
Text conversions
Act on the selection and paste the result back: upper, lower, title and sentence case; single and double curly quotes; round and square brackets; remove soft hyphens; convert double quotes to single; HTML bold. Handy for technical translators who spend their day tidying other people’s text.
The Library Editor
Open Settings → Edit library… (or press the key you give it – see Keyboard shortcuts). The tree on the left mirrors the menu: its headings become sections, submenus hang under them, and every entry – snippet, search, AI prompt, bookmark, conversion – is reachable. Add, edit, delete and reorder; press Save & rebuild and the menu updates without a restart.
Entry types
Each entry has a kind that decides what it does with the selection:
| Kind | What it does |
|---|---|
text | types out literal text |
keys | sends a key combination, e.g. ^+* |
url | opens a web address |
run | launches a file or folder |
search | looks the selection up at a URL, with {q} replaced by it and {sl}/{tl} by the language pair – see Searches |
multisearch | opens several search URLs at once in a new browser window – see Searches |
ai | runs an AI prompt over the selection – see AI actions |
action | calls a built-in function, such as a case conversion |
submenu | holds other entries |
heading, separator | structure only |
The file is plain JSON, so it can also be edited by hand, kept in version control, or copied to another machine.