Show HN: Textile – A desktop app for weaving together bits of text

Post by stack_framer » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

Alifatisk wrote: post #18

stack_framer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too familiar with Espanso, but Textile is not a text expander. Textile allows you to pre-define a sequence of steps that dynamically generate the text you want, by running commands on your computer, reading your clipboard, or using hard-coded text you provide. Here's a quick example, and one that I often use with Textile to generate a preview URL based on my current branch: (1) Start with the output of the co…

Can't this be done with a bash script? Or is this supposed to be a more convenient, ergonomic and declarative way to do it?

Post by stack_framer » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

baliex wrote: post #22

stack_framer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but this is a great suggestion. I imagine a flow that looks something like this: (1) When creating the textile, you would add a step to "wait for new clipboard data." (2) When you run the textile, and it gets to that step, a modal would appear, prompting you to copy the new thing to your clipboard. (3) Once you've got the new thing on your clipboard, you would go back and click "Continue" on the modal from step 2…

That’s exactly what I was thinking. And I think you’re saying the same thing, but to be sure: the _wait_ wouldn’t be a timer, it’d be watching the clipboard for changes and proceeding as soon as it changed. If we’re going to do the discovery out in the open.. it would be nice to be able to specify the prompt as part of the Textile (e.g. “Copy the GitHub URL”). And then also showed the clipboard contents it is going t…