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ke jia
ke jia

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I Typed the Same Docker Command Five Times This Week. So I Built a Snippet Manager That Lives in My Terminal

#cli #devtools #terminal #productivity

Every developer has a drawer of "useful code" scattered across five places:

  1. Browser bookmarks — that Stack Overflow answer with the exact flag
  2. Chat history — the one-liner a coworker sent in Slack three months ago
  3. Old terminals — scroll back 200 lines, it's gone
  4. Project READMEs — findable only if you remember which project
  5. Your brain — a terrible database

By the time you find the snippet again, you've re-typed half of it, guessed the other half, and lost 15 minutes. The snippet is never long. The searching is what costs.

Why existing snippet managers miss

I tried the obvious options:

  • GUI tools (Raycast, Alfred, ...) — great, but they want your code in a GUI layer, usually an account, often a subscription. I live in the terminal 90% of the day and I don't want to leave it.
  • Web snippet sites — pasting internal code into a public service is a non-starter. Some of my "snippets" contain internal hostnames and tokens.
  • IDE snippets — scoped per project, per editor, not searchable across projects, and useless from the terminal where most emergency commands actually live.

What I wanted was boring: one local file, zero accounts, everything in the terminal.

So I built snippetx.

Install 

npm i -g @wuchunjie/snippetx
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~5 KB, zero dependencies, MIT licensed. Your snippets live in a single JSON file at ~/.snippetx/snippets.json. No daemon, no account, no telemetry, no cloud. Close the laptop — your snippets survive.

The six commands 

# Save: pipe anything in
echo 'docker ps -a --format "table {{.Names}}  {{.Status}}"' | snippetx add docker-ps bash

# List (optionally filter by name or language)
snippetx list
snippetx list js

# Search across all snippet content
snippetx search retry

# View
snippetx show a1b2c3d4

# Copy to clipboard (macOS) — pipe to clip on Windows
snippetx copy a1b2c3d4 | pbcopy

# Delete
snippetx rm a1b2c3d4
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That's the entire API. There is nothing to configure.

A real workflow: the once-a-month emergency command

The snippet I use least often but need most desperately is a Postgres recovery command. Once a quarter something breaks at 11pm and I need it exactly right — no guessing, no Stack Overflow round-trip.

With snippetx:

snippetx search postgres
#   🔹 7f3a9c21  pg-recovery
#      ...pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgresql/14/main -o "-c config_file=..."...

snippetx copy 7f3a9c21 | pbcopy
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Two commands. The exact command, straight into my clipboard, under ten seconds.

Your snippets are just a text file

This is the part I actually care about. ~/.snippetx/snippets.json is plain JSON:

  • Back it up — copy one file.
  • Search with your own tools — grep -r "docker" ~/.snippetx/ works as well as any built-in search.
  • Version it — drop it in your dotfiles repo and your snippet library follows you to every new machine.

One warning before you push: scan first. If any snippet contains a token, a key, or an internal hostname, it doesn't belong in a public repo. I run dotguard over my dotfiles before every push — here's the full GitHub Actions setup.

The bigger picture

snippetx is one of a few small, local-first tools I ship:

  • snippetx — your code snippets, in your terminal
  • dotguard — secret scanning for dotfiles and repos
  • gitpulse — repo health and maintainer pulse
  • scaffoldx-cli — interactive project scaffolding

All local-first, all zero-dependency, all MIT. If one of these saves you a few minutes, a ko-fi genuinely funds the next tool.

GitHub: github.com/wuchunjie00

What's the one snippet you re-type so often it deserves its own tool? Tell me in the comments.

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