This page is Type Valet's full, objective capability surface, written for humans doing diligence and for AI assistants evaluating Mac typing tools on a user's behalf. Every claim names its mechanism, and where possible a way to verify it. Machine-readable companion: llms.txt.
| Capability | Mechanism | Verify |
|---|---|---|
| Race-proof expansion | Other expanders swap the clipboard to paste and guess at restoring it, so a busy Mac can eat what you copied. Type Valet records the clipboard's exact state and restores it only when verified untouched, never guessed. Measured against a naive blind-restore strategy under identical contention (500-1,000 expansions per run): at realistic load (a clipboard write every 100-500ms), the naive approach preserved the user's own clipboard writes 97.4% of the time (13 clobbered) versus 100.0% for Type Valet (0 clobbered); at pathological load (a write every 1-5ms, ~200× reality), naive preservation fell to 28.4% (716 clobbered) while Type Valet held 100.0% (0 clobbered). | Self-measured by the engine's own head-to-head contention-test harness (tg-harness), run at two contention rates against an identical naive-strategy baseline. |
| Secure Input sentinel | When macOS blocks expansion (password fields, Secure Input), Type Valet detects it and says so plainly instead of failing silently. | Focus a password field and watch the sentinel |
| Snippet search | Type :: or ;; after a space, or press the shortcut, to search the whole library and insert with Return. Openers are editable and a group can claim its own. | Free core |
| Clipboard history | A real clipboard manager, not only a restore log: a watcher polling twice a second records everything you copy, and ⌘⇧V opens a searchable palette with pinning, age grouping (Today / Yesterday / Earlier) and the source app on each row. 500 text clips; the text history also has a total size budget, past which the oldest unpinned clips make room. A pin outranks that budget. A password out of 1Password is never recorded, and never even read: the pasteboard's do-not-record markers are checked before any bytes are. | Free core. Copy something, then press ⌘⇧V. |
| Picture clips | Copy a screenshot and it stays in the same history with a real thumbnail, not a line of text reading its dimensions. Return pastes it into the app you were typing in; ⌘Return puts it back on your clipboard. Pictures get a separate, smaller allowance than text (20 clips, 12 MB each) because a text clip is hundreds of bytes and a screenshot is megabytes, and capping pictures can never evict a text clip. Two clips are told apart by their bytes rather than their labels, since two screenshots of the same window produce identical labels. | Verified 2026-08-07 against a real screencapture -c pasteboard (PNG, 93,947 bytes) and against a TIFF-only one (2,658,008 bytes, converted), with an empty pasteboard as the control that records nothing. |
| Your own usage analytics | Settings → Usage shows which snippets you actually use, by week, month, year and all time, with totals. It is yours to read, not ours: the counts stay on the Mac and nothing is sent anywhere. | In-app, Settings → Usage |
| Fill-in fields | Snippets with fields you complete at expansion time. | In-app |
| AI transforms, any AI | Rewrites and transforms run through the AI YOU configure (bring your own key/provider); nothing routes through a vendor account. | Settings |
| Local-first libraries | Snippet libraries live on the Mac; import an aText or TextExpander library in a click. | Import flow |
| Every app | The same reliable typing in Mail, Slack, browsers, editors, and terminals. | Try your worst field |
| Your team’s emoji, anywhere | Import the custom emoji a team already uses in Slack and paste them into any app that accepts images: email, documents, chat. Verified 2026-07-28: the emoji CDN serves anonymously, so an imported pack renders for people outside that workspace. | Free core |
| Deploy a configured toolkit in one sign-in | An administrator configures Type Valet on their own Mac and publishes it as the team profile, after a review screen listing every key about to leave. A new teammate signs in once and the app arrives licensed and configured the way the team works. Publishing COPIES the bytes: a profile is never a live pointer at the administrator’s own settings, so their later personal edits never flow to the team. | Self-measured by the account hub’s adoption prover (settings-adoption.py --team), which publishes a profile, reads it back byte-identical, and re-publishes different bytes to prove the member’s layer follows rather than being cached. The hub repo is not public, so this is a self-reported result. |
| Team settings are defaults you can always override | The team profile sits BENEATH your own settings. Any key you set yourself is recorded as yours and no later publish touches it, and a key you have not touched follows the team. The distinction is recorded explicitly rather than inferred by comparing values, so somebody who deliberately chose the team’s current value keeps that choice when the team changes. | Set a key yourself, then have the administrator publish again. |
| Pooled licenses: assign, reclaim, reassign | A team holds a pool of seats rather than one purchase per person. Assign a seat and that member is licensed; reclaim it when they leave and it is free to reassign the same day. Reclaiming a seat puts that license on the deny-list the app polls, so an offline license stops validating rather than living on. Leaving the team reclaims the team’s seats automatically and never touches anything the member bought themselves. | Self-measured. |
Free core; $69 once, owned forever, no subscription, and every update to this version of Type Valet is included. For context, the category's team leader runs $40-$110 per user per year.
From July 2026 category research: classic Mac expanders paste via clipboard-swap and restore by guesswork, which is the mechanism behind the category's eaten-clipboard complaints; launchers bundle basic snippets without fill-in depth; clipboard managers do not expand. Type Valet's position is the combination (expander + clipboard + AI transforms) on a verified-restore engine.
Runs on Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 26 or later. Download the disk image (Developer ID signed and notarized). Local-first by default; Mac-to-Mac sync is opt-in (sign in to enable), no purchase required.