Import Clips from a Folder

What it does

Pick a folder on your disk and Blue Synergy imports every text / code file inside as a new clip. Useful for bulk-loading snippets, documentation excerpts, prompt libraries, or a flat directory of .txt notes.

Blue Synergy recognises 30+ text and code extensions (.txt, .md, .sql, .py, .js, .ts, .rs, .go, .yaml, .json, .html, .css, .sh, .ps1, .bat, and more). Binary files and unknown extensions are skipped silently.

How to use it

Two entry points

1. Top menu — File → Import Clips from Folder… Pick a folder; imported clips land at the top level of the clips tree.

2. Folder right-click — open the clips sidebar, right-click on any folder, choose Import clips from folder… Imported clips are placed inside the right-clicked folder (easy way to bulk-populate a target folder).

After import

  • Each file becomes a clip whose title is the filename without the extension (e.g. notes.md → clip title notes, config.yaml → clip title config). Cleaner in the list and less visual noise than the full filename.
  • source_app is set to "Blue Synergy", source_title to the parent folder name so you can filter all clips from one import in one go (e.g. *source_title=MySnippets).
  • Clips are placed in the selected folder (or top level if imported via the File menu).
  • A status toast reports how many were imported and how many were skipped.

If something can’t be imported

Unreadable files (permission denied, vanished mid-import, etc.) no longer fail silently. When one or more files fail, an Import Result Dialog opens with:

  • A count of successful imports and errors
  • A scrollable list of every failed file showing path — reason

When all files import cleanly, you get a success toast and no dialog.

Text encoding — Windows legacy files

A large class of real-world text files on Windows is not encoded in UTF-8 — ClipMate exports, Notepad pre-2019 defaults, old .txt archives from other tools. These typically use Windows-1252 (also known as ANSI / Latin-1-extended) where accented characters like ä, ö, ü, é, ñ, ß are stored as a single byte.

Blue Synergy tries several decoders in order, so everyday files Just Work:

  1. UTF-8 with BOM — modern export default
  2. UTF-16 LE / BE with BOM — Notepad’s “Unicode” / “Unicode big endian” option
  3. Plain UTF-8 — most sources
  4. Windows-1252 — fallback for any file the first three didn’t match

The Windows-1252 fallback is lossless for every byte sequence — German umlauts, Windows smart quotes (', "), en-dash (–), the Euro sign (€), and so on all decode to their correct Unicode characters.

What this means in practice

  • German ClipMate exports with ä, ö, ü as single bytes import cleanly (this used to error with “stream did not contain valid UTF-8”).
  • Files that contain literal ? characters — sometimes visible in ClipMate / Perplexity exports — stay as ?. Those files had the original character (usually an emoji) already replaced by ? at export time by the source tool. Blue Synergy cannot recover what was lost on the way in; re-export from the source with UTF-8 if possible.

When the decoder gets it wrong

The fallback chain is encoding-aware but not a full charset sniffer. If a file is actually Shift-JIS, GB2312, or some other Asian codepage, the Windows-1252 fallback will decode each byte but produce garbled text. Re-save the file as UTF-8 first — Notepad, VS Code and every modern editor can do this from the Save As dialog.

Tips & gotchas

  • Large folders are fine — Blue Synergy streams the imports; the UI stays responsive.
  • Files over ~1 MB are imported but may slow down rendering in the clip preview — split long documents beforehand.
  • Empty files produce a blank clip (useful as a placeholder; harmless otherwise).
  • Retention rules apply as usual; put the import folder under Exclude from retention first if you want the clips to stay forever.