Stop opening
your password spreadsheet.

A shared password lives in a spreadsheet because that’s where everyone can find it. A license key sits in a text file because retyping it is annoying. A recovery code gets pasted into a note because you’ll need it again someday. None of that is careless. It’s just the path of least resistance when there’s no faster, safer place to keep it.

The moment that catches people off guard is a screen share. A support call, a demo, a pairing session, and the file with 25 passwords in it is sitting open in another tab, one Alt-Tab away from being visible to everyone on the call.

Long, unique passwords are the obvious case, but the same abbreviation-and-insert workflow works for anything sensitive and reusable: API keys and access tokens, software license keys, account recovery codes, database connection strings, or a private internal template you don’t want showing up in a general search. If it’s something you paste often and would rather not display, it belongs in the Secure Folder.

Secure Folder content is encrypted using the same protection Windows and macOS already use to guard your saved passwords (DPAPI on Windows, Keychain on macOS), tied to your own login. It’s not just the password text either: names, tags, and abbreviations for anything in the Secure Folder are encrypted too, so browsing your library, searching, or glancing at quick-paste never surfaces so much as the title of a secure entry by accident. A value only ever decrypts the moment you deliberately reveal it in the editor or insert it somewhere.

Inserting a secure value briefly uses the system clipboard the same way any paste does, but Klackey treats that moment carefully. The secret never gets recorded into Klackey’s own clipboard history, whatever was on your clipboard beforehand is restored immediately afterward (even if the paste itself fails), and on Windows, the clipboard write is marked to keep it out of Windows Clipboard History and Cloud Clipboard sync. The value passes through the clipboard; it doesn’t linger there.

Windows Clipboard History and Cloud Clipboard both honor that exclusion automatically. A third-party clipboard manager will too, if it checks the same standard exclusion marker Klackey sets, the same convention other password-manager-style tools rely on. One that doesn’t check it could still capture the value during that brief moment, since the clipboard is a shared system resource that no app can fully lock against every other running process. That’s a limitation of how OS clipboards work in general, not something specific to Klackey; it’s worth knowing what else is monitoring your clipboard on a machine you use for sensitive pastes.

By default, a Secure Folder abbreviation expands as fast as any other. That’s deliberate, since the encryption already protects the data itself. If you’d rather add a confirmation step, an optional PIN can require you to unlock secure expansion before it pastes, then automatically re-lock after a few minutes of your choosing, or immediately if your computer locks or goes to sleep. Off by default, on if you want it.

Customize how this feature works, including your own quick-paste and screenshot hotkeys, text expansion preferences, and what the rest of Klackey remembers.

Because Secure Folder encryption is tied to your OS login, a backup restored on a different computer or after a reinstall can’t normally decrypt what was in it. By design, that’s what keeps it safe at rest. An optional backup password closes that gap: set it once, and future backups re-encrypt Secure Folder content with a portable key derived from that password, so it can be recovered on a replacement machine by entering the same password again.

Does Klackey replace my password manager? No. The Secure Folder protects sensitive reusable text and lets you insert it by abbreviation without displaying the stored value, especially useful for the long passwords and credentials that often end up in a document or spreadsheet instead. It’s not a full password manager: Klackey doesn’t do website matching, breach monitoring, or shared vault administration.