The window and the palette

There are two ways into Sidekick. The window is for browsing: clipboard on the left, the menu as a tree on the right. The palette is for finding: one search box over everything. Both capture whatever text you had selected when they opened, so the thing you act on is the thing you were looking at.

The window – `

Press ` (backtick) in any application and the window opens with the clipboard history focused, because that is what gets used most. The menu is on the right as a tree of sections – snippet library, bookmarks, AI, text conversions, searches – that you open and close.

Key	Does
↑ ↓	move through the list you are in
→	cross from the clipboard into the menu; open a folder
←	close a folder, walk up, and cross back to the clipboard
Enter	use the selected clip or run the selected menu entry
Tab	switch between the two panes
typing	filters both panes at once; Ctrl+F jumps to the search box
Alt+1–9	jump straight to the first, second, third… menu section
Ctrl+↑ Ctrl+↓	step from section to section
Home End	first and last entry
Ctrl+C	copy the selected clip without pasting it
Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3	switch between the Clipboard, QuickTrans and Scratchpad tabs
Ctrl+= Ctrl+- Ctrl+0	larger text, smaller text, back to 9 pt
Esc	close

Using a clip pastes it into the window you came from and ticks it in the list, so a list of terms can be worked through top to bottom without losing your place. See Clipboard history.

The second tab of the same window is QuickTrans. The menu stays beside it, so you can translate something, insert it, and run a menu action without changing windows.

The third tab, Scratchpad, is a note: one box of plain text, saved as you type to data\scratchpad.txt. Ctrl+Alt+N opens the window there with the cursor at the end of the note, ready to type.

Opens on:, at the right of the tab strip, chooses the tab the backtick opens on: Clipboard, QuickTrans, Scratchpad, or whichever you used last. The QuickTrans and Scratchpad shortcuts always open their own tab.

Text size – Ctrl+= and Ctrl+-, or the − and + on the QuickTrans tab – changes the text you read and write: the note, the QuickTrans source box and the translations. The clipboard list, the menu and the labels stay the size they are. The size is remembered.

Tip

On US-International keyboards, common for anyone who types Dutch, French or German, the backtick is a dead key waiting to compose à, è and ù, and claiming it breaks accented typing. Change the key in Settings → Keyboard shortcuts…; Win+Space and Ctrl+Alt+Space are good, rarely taken choices. See Keyboard shortcuts.

The palette – Ctrl+Alt+Space

The palette is one searchable list of everything Sidekick knows: clipboard history, snippets, searches, AI prompts, bookmarks and conversions in a single window. Type a few letters and it narrows; ↑ and ↓ move, PgUp and PgDn move ten at a time, Enter runs the entry, Esc closes.

Use it when you know what you want. Use the window when you want to browse a category you cannot name yet.

The classic popup menu – Ctrl + backtick

The menu on its own, as a small popup at the mouse pointer, without the clipboard pane. Everything is reachable in two keystrokes: the shortcut, then the accelerator letter underlined in the entry.

The menu’s sections

What the menu contains is entirely yours to change – see Snippets, bookmarks and conversions. The starter set has these sections:

• Snippet library – HTML fragments, special characters, regex patterns
• Bookmarks – online and local
• AI – prompts that run over the selection, and QuickTrans
• Text conversions – case, quotes, brackets, soft hyphens, HTML bold
• Web searches – terminology sources one at a time, or a whole batch
• Settings – the language pair and language packs, the Library Editor, keyboard shortcuts, text expansions, AI providers and keys, pausing clipboard capture, and reloading