Settings

Snipdeck has no settings window yet. What you change often is in the gallery’s ⋯ menu; everything else lives in a plain JSON file, settings.json, created the first time you run the app. This page covers both, and where Snipdeck keeps its files on Windows and Linux.

The ⋯ menu

The ⋯ button at the end of the gallery toolbar holds the settings you are most likely to change. Each one takes effect at once and is saved for you.

A few more settings are saved from where you use them: the S / M / L card size in the status bar (thumb_size_index), and the target and favourite languages in the OCR + Translate popup (translate_target, translate_favs).

Editing settings.json

To change a key by hand:

1. Quit Snipdeck: right-click the tray icon and choose Exit. Closing the window only hides Snipdeck to the tray. Where there is no tray icon, as on GNOME without the AppIndicator extension, closing the window quits.
2. Open settings.json in a text editor (see File locations).
3. Change a value, keep the file valid JSON, and save.
4. Start Snipdeck again. It reads the file once, at startup.

Snipdeck rewrites settings.json whenever you change something from the app, so an edit you make while it is running is overwritten the next time you use the ⋯ menu.

The file does not need every key. A key you leave out uses its default, and keys Snipdeck does not know are ignored.

File locations

On Linux, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME take the place of ~/.config and ~/.local/share when they are set. On Windows, paste %APPDATA% or %LOCALAPPDATA% into the File Explorer address bar to jump there.

Snips are stored as lossless WebP. A snip wider or taller than WebP allows (16383 pixels), such as a capture across several monitors or a large collage, is stored as PNG. Snips saved as PNG by an older version are converted to WebP in the background the first time a newer version starts; the gallery stays usable meanwhile.

settings.json keys

Values are case-sensitive. Language codes are written with a hyphen: zh-CN, not zh_cn.

Older versions had keys that no longer exist, such as include_border_on_save or selection_tint. If they are still in your file, Snipdeck ignores them.

Global hotkeys

The global hotkeys are stored as strings such as "CtrlAltShift+A":

The defaults use Ctrl+Alt+Shift because Ctrl+Shift+C is copy in terminals and Ctrl+Shift+A and G are taken in browsers. If your file still holds the old Ctrl+Shift defaults, Snipdeck moves them to the new ones; a combination you chose yourself is left alone.

On Windows and on a Linux X11 session these keys decide the hotkeys. On Wayland the desktop owns global shortcuts: Snipdeck proposes these combinations the first time it starts, your desktop asks you to approve them, and after that you change them in your desktop’s keyboard settings, not here.

Launch at login

Launch at Login, in the ⋯ menu and in the tray menu, writes an ordinary startup entry rather than a setting:

Both start Snipdeck with --autostart, so it comes up hidden in the tray instead of opening the gallery. If you move the program, Snipdeck rewrites the entry for its new location the next time you start it by hand.

Example settings.json

A file that uses the light theme, the Turkish interface and an imported upload host could look like this. The host is a placeholder; yours comes from your server’s .sxcu file through ⋯ → Upload to → Add from a .sxcu file….

{
  "language": "tr",
  "dark_theme": false,
  "translate_target": "tr",
  "translate_favs": ["tr", "en", "de"],
  "default_format": "jpg",
  "upload_service": "custom:My server",
  "upload_hosts": [
    {
      "Name": "My server",
      "RequestMethod": "POST",
      "RequestURL": "https://img.example.com/api/upload",
      "Headers": { "Authorization": "YOUR_API_KEY" },
      "Body": "MultipartFormData",
      "FileFormName": "file",
      "URL": "{json:files[0].url}"
    }
  ]
}

Any key you leave out uses its default.

See also

• Sharing and export: uploads, Save and the share actions that use these settings
• Languages: the interface language codes
• OCR + Translate: how translate_target and translate_favs are used
• Privacy and security: what stays on your machine