CopyIt

A fast, lightweight Windows desktop app to store your scripts and AI prompts as copyable tiles. Built in Rust with egui/eframe — it compiles to a single native .exe with no runtime, no WebView, and no installer.

Features

• Tile/card grid: title, category badge, preview, and a Copy button (top-right of each card).
• One-click copy to the clipboard, with a brief "Copied" confirmation.
• Instant search across title, body, and category.
• Category filter dropdown.
• 37 selectable color themes (Dark, Light, Nord, Dracula, Solarized, Gruvbox, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, One Dark/Light, Monokai, GitHub, Ayu, Rose Pine, Everforest, Material, Kanagawa, Night Owl, Zenburn, Synthwave '84, Cobalt2, Horizon, and more).
• Add / edit / delete snippets from inside the app.
• Password-protected snippets: tick Protect this snippet in the editor and the body is encrypted at rest — the card shows a masked hint until you unlock, and a vault lock/unlock control appears in the top bar.
• Data stored as plain, hand-editable JSON (snippets.json) in a stable per-user folder (%APPDATA%\CopyIt), so it survives rebuilding, moving, or replacing the .exe (protected bodies are ciphertext inside the same file).

Build (on Windows)

1. Install Rust (recent stable, 1.85+): https://rustup.rs

2. In this folder, run:

   cargo build --release

3. Your executable is at:

   target\release\copyit.exe
   

   Run that .exe from wherever you like. On first launch it creates snippets.json in %APPDATA%\CopyIt\, pre-seeded with a few Git scripts and AI prompts. Edit, add, or delete freely — changes save automatically.

Debug builds show a console window; the --release build is a clean windowless GUI app.

Where's my data?

snippets.json lives in %APPDATA%\CopyIt\ — a stable folder tied to your Windows user account, not to wherever copyit.exe happens to be. That means recompiling, moving the .exe, or running a fresh build all see the same data. Back it up, sync it, or edit it by hand — it's just JSON. Your canonical category list and chosen theme live in config.json beside it. If you're upgrading from an older version that stored data next to the .exe, CopyIt automatically picks that data up the first time you run the new version.

[
  { "id": 1, "title": "…", "category": "Git", "body": "…" }
]

Want a card to stay secret? Tick Protect this snippet in the Add/Edit dialog. Its body is stored only as ciphertext (XChaCha20-Poly1305, key derived from your vault password with Argon2id), and the card shows a short hint plus bullets instead of the text. Copying or editing a protected card asks for the vault password once per session; the top bar shows Vault locked/unlocked with a Lock button to drop the key from memory.

Notes

• Pinned to eframe/egui 0.27 for a stable, well-tested API surface.
• Release profile is tuned for a small binary and fast startup (opt-level = "z", LTO, stripped).
• No password recovery. Forget the vault password and protected bodies are unrecoverable. Titles and categories stay visible, and a protected card shows its first 5 body characters as a hint (bodies under 12 characters show none) — keep secrets out of titles.
• Vault passwords must be at least 8 characters. Shorter passwords are rejected at creation time.
• Single instance. Only one CopyIt window can run at a time — a second launch exits immediately.
• Unprotected snippets remain plaintext JSON, so the "don't store credentials" rule applies to unprotected cards. An older version of CopyIt reading a file with protected cards sees empty bodies — don't downgrade after protecting.

For contributors

The UI is exercised by an in-process simulation suite that drives the real CopyIt UI headlessly — the same code a user runs, pumped frame by frame with synthesized input. Run the journeys headlessly (this is what CI does):

cargo test --bin copyit sim_journeys -- --test-threads 1

To watch one journey in the real window (local only — requires the sim cargo feature):

cargo run --features sim -- --simulate first-run-explorer --seed 42

Journeys never touch your real %APPDATA%\CopyIt data: each run gets a throwaway store in the temp dir, and failures leave an inspectable report bundle under sim-report/.