What counts as a secret
Some of what you copy is dangerous to leave lying in a list. An API key. A login token. A card number. Relic looks at every capture and, when the shape of it matches one of those, treats the item as a secret from then on.
A secret is an ordinary item in every way except how it is shown and handled. It is stored the same, it syncs the same, and it is encrypted the same as everything else. What changes is that Relic hides it until you ask, and refuses to let it leak out sideways.
Relic marks it with a tag you can see: #secret. That is how it knows, and it is also how you find every secret at once by searching tag:secret.
Turn that off and new captures stop being marked, so nothing new is hidden. Items already marked keep their tag. On a phone the same switch is Settings › Mask secrets.
A secret in the list
A secret row shows dots instead of its text, and its name reads Secret · hidden until you reveal it. Give it a title of your own and the row says that instead, with the same · hidden after it.
The eye at the right of the row shows it. It sits there on every secret row, without a menu to open first, because reading the value is usually why you came looking. Hovering it says Show, and once it is open, Hide. A revealed secret goes back to dots as soon as you close the window.
Opening a secret
Double-click a secret and the editor opens with the value in a well of its own, still covered, with a Reveal button beside it. Press Reveal and the text appears, selectable but not editable: Relic will not let you type over a secret by accident. Hide puts it back.
Everything around it works as usual. You can give it a title, write a note, add tags, keep it in your Vault, and delete it.
The secret tag is the one tag you cannot take off. Where every other tag has a small × to remove it, this one has a padlock. Dropping it would quietly unmask the value everywhere, which is never what someone means to do. If an item was marked by mistake, delete it and copy the thing again with masking turned off.
What secrets never do
- They never carry formatting. Bold, links and colours are dropped at capture and never stored, so a redacted copy of your vault cannot leak the value inside its formatting. See Bold, links and colours.
- They never drag out. Every other row can be dragged from Relic into another app. Secret rows stay put, so a slip of the mouse cannot drop a key into a chat window.
- They ask before they are shared. Create a share link for a secret and Relic stops on a screen headed Share this secret?, which reminds you that anyone with the link or the QR can read it. Carry on and the one-time view is already switched on, so the link dies after it is opened once.
Clearing the clipboard
When you copy a secret out of Relic, it goes on your clipboard like anything else, and a clipboard tends to sit there until the next copy. Relic can empty it for you half a minute later.
It only clears what it put there. If you have copied something else in the meantime, that copy is yours and Relic leaves it alone. Relic also asks your system not to keep the copy in its own clipboard history or send it to a cloud clipboard.
This part runs on Windows and on a Mac. On Linux there is no way for an app to empty the clipboard reliably, so it does not.
Copies from a password manager usually never reach Relic at all, for a different reason. See what Relic skips already.