Switching from Text Blaze: What Transfers and What Doesn't

Moving a Text Blaze library into SlashSnip is a partial transfer, not a conversion: plain-text snippets, their shortcuts, and folder names can be carried across by hand through a JSON or CSV file. Formatting, forms, formulas, and dynamic commands do not come across — anything Text Blaze computes at insertion time arrives as ordinary characters inside the snippet body.

There is no one-click bridge between the two products, and SlashSnip has no Text Blaze-specific importer. It reads generic JSON and CSV, matching on common field names. That covers the plain-text part of most libraries and does nothing for the rest, which makes the useful first step a counting exercise: how much of your library is actually plain text?

Where does Text Blaze keep its export?

Text Blaze does not document export on a dedicated help page. Its documentation index lists guides for writing and using snippets, and export, import, and backup are not among them; the only mention on the marketing site is a single line in the FAQ. Everything in this section comes instead from replies by Text Blaze staff on the company's own community forum, dated between 2019 and 2024. Every one of them is linked under Sources at the end.

What those replies establish:

• the export lives in the Text Blaze dashboard under an import/export section (staff reply, 2020);
• you can export a single folder rather than the whole account (staff reply, 2024);
• the export format is JSON, and the importer additionally accepts CSV (staff reply, 2019);
• the JSON preserves formatting by storing it as HTML in an html property on the snippet (staff reply, 2021).

Two things here are deliberately left open. Plan limits on export are not stated officially: the Text Blaze plans page does not mention export in any tier, so confirm eligibility in your own account rather than assuming it. The precise shape of the JSON is not reproduced here either. This guide is not based on a live export, and you should inspect the file you actually get before writing any conversion against it.

Those staff answers span five years, and dashboards move. Check the current Text Blaze docs and forum for the present path before you plan around a specific menu location.

What transfers and what doesn't

What you have in Text Blaze	What happens when it reaches SlashSnip
Plain-text snippet body	Transfers, through a JSON or CSV file you prepare yourself
Shortcut or abbreviation	Transfers as a value; you still decide how it maps onto the SlashSnip prefix
Snippet title or label	Transfers
Folders	Arrive as categories, capped at five on the free plan
Formatting: bold, italic, colors	Does not transfer — it lives in the HTML property that the SlashSnip importer does not read
Forms and fill-in fields	Do not transfer; the markup arrives as literal characters in the body
Formulas and calculated values	Do not transfer; same literal-character result
Commands and conditional behavior	Do not transfer; same literal-character result

The last three rows decide whether this migration is worth starting. A snippet that computes a date, branches on a dropdown answer, or prompts you for two fields before inserting is not a snippet SlashSnip can run. After import it becomes a body of text that happens to contain the original markup, and that markup goes into whatever field you are typing in, verbatim. You do not want to find that out in front of a customer. Simplify those snippets before the import, not after.

Formatting stops at the same border, and the reason is structural. Text Blaze stores styling as HTML on a separate property. The SlashSnip importer reads the plain-text fields (the usual text, content, body, or replace keys) and never looks at an HTML property. Nothing is silently mangled: the styling has nowhere to land, so you get the text without it.

There is a storage model underneath that, and why local-first text expansion matters walks through it. The side-by-side Text Blaze breakdown puts the feature sets next to each other.

When to switch, and when to stay

Stay on Text Blaze if your daily work runs on the dynamic layer. Snippets that ask you questions before inserting, calculate dates or totals, or change their output based on a dropdown are the part of the product with no equivalent here. Rebuilding those by hand means losing the automation, not moving it. No import format changes that.

Switching makes sense when what you actually maintain is a plain-text library: support replies, boilerplate paragraphs, code fragments, prompt skeletons, addresses, disclaimers. And when you would rather that library lived in your own browser profile, with no account attached to it. That is the trade. You give up form logic and formulas, and you get a snippet library that stays local, works offline, and exports to a file you keep.

That counting exercise, in practice: how many of your snippets contain any dynamic element? If that number is small and those snippets are ones you rarely fire, the migration is mostly copying. If the dynamic ones are your daily drivers, stay.

Migration steps

1. Export one folder from Text Blaze first. Folder-level export exists (staff reply, 2024), and a single folder is a better test subject than an entire account. Start with the folder holding your simplest plain-text snippets.
2. Open the file and read it before converting anything. You need to see which key holds the body, which holds the shortcut, and how folders are represented. Do not trust a structure described in an article, including this one — trust the file in front of you.
3. Separate the plain-text snippets from the dynamic ones. Two lists. The plain-text list is the migration; the dynamic list is a decision about each snippet individually.
4. Simplify the dynamic snippets into static drafts. Where a form field asked for a customer name, place {cursor} so the caret lands in the gap after insertion. If the snippet pulled in copied text, {{clipboard}} may cover it; if it computed today's date, {{date}} or {{time}} may be enough. Anything doing real arithmetic or branching becomes a shorter, simpler template, or gets left behind.
5. Build a JSON or CSV file for SlashSnip. SlashSnip's importer matches field names after normalizing case and separators. For the trigger, shortcut, trigger, abbreviation, or abbr all work; for the body, text, content, body, or replace. Titles come from title, name, or label; grouping comes from category or folder.
6. Import through the SlashSnip dashboard and watch the free-plan limits. A file that did not come from a SlashSnip backup is treated as an ordinary import, so the free-plan caps of 25 snippets and 5 folders apply to it. A 200-snippet library will not land whole on the free plan. Bring across a first batch, or check what the paid plans include before importing everything.
7. Test the triggers where you actually type. Type // followed by one of your imported shortcuts in a real compose field, then open the browse menu with /// to confirm your categories look the way you expect.

After the first batch works, keep the original Text Blaze export file unchanged somewhere you control. The snippet backup checklist explains why the untouched original matters more than the cleaned copy. Once your library lives here, the SlashSnip import and export guide covers the same workflow from this side.

What to check after the import

Three things go wrong most often, and all of them surface as soon as you start typing.

Triggers that collided: two Text Blaze snippets with similar abbreviations can become two SlashSnip shortcuts where one shadows the other in the browse menu. Rename as you go rather than after fifty imports.

Then there is markup that survived the sorting. If a dynamic snippet slipped through step 3, its original placeholder syntax shows up as visible characters in the body. Fix that in the snippet itself once the library is in place.

Last is whitespace. Snippet bodies arrive exactly as they appear in the file, leading and trailing spaces included, and a template that starts with an accidental space keeps starting with it.

Sources

• Text Blaze forum, staff reply on importing a JSON file with snippets (2020)
• Text Blaze forum, staff reply on exporting a single folder (2024)
• Text Blaze forum, staff reply on import, export, and backup formats (2019)
• Text Blaze forum, staff reply on formatting stored as HTML in the JSON export (2021)
• Text Blaze FAQ
• Text Blaze plans and pricing
• SlashSnip documentation: importing and exporting snippets