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What Are Gadgets?

Gadgets are the plugins that power everything Torchsnap can do. Every search result, action, and custom view you see in the launcher is provided by a gadget. Torchsnap ships with a set of built-in gadgets out of the box, and you can install additional ones or build your own.

Gadgets surface their results in different ways:

Plain search: most gadgets contribute results alongside everything else when you type. For example, the App Launcher and System Commands both respond to the same query, and their results are ranked together by relevance and frecency.

Prefix routing: some gadgets activate when you type a specific prefix character. This lets you target a single gadget directly:

Prefix Gadget
= Calculator: evaluate math expressions
: Emoji Picker: search emoji by shortcode

Inline detection: some gadgets activate when they recognize a pattern anywhere in the query. Bangs trigger when ! appears at any position (e.g., pantine !crates), Open URL activates when you type a URL, and the Calculator also detects math expressions automatically without requiring the = prefix.

Custom views: a few gadgets render their own UI beyond the standard result list. The Clipboard Manager shows a grid of recent clipboard entries, and the Calculator displays the result inline above the search bar.

You can enable, disable, install, and uninstall gadgets in Settings. Some gadgets also have their own configuration panels. These appear in the Settings sidebar under the gadget’s name.

The following gadgets ship with Torchsnap by default: