What Do Spectre's Persistence Options Remember?

Updated

Spectre's persistence options remember two things between visits: your last-used language and your last-used expiration setting. They are convenience settings for creating pastes, not account features and not related to encryption.

The two persistence options

Spectre's Options panel lists these under Persistence:

Option What it remembers
Remember my last-used language The syntax/language selection you used most recently
Remember my last-used expiration The expiration period you selected most recently (Forever, Ten Minutes, an Hour, a Day, two Days)

When either option is on, the next time you open the paste form, that field starts with your previous choice instead of the default. You can still change it before submitting — persistence only sets the starting value.

What persistence does not do

  • It is not tied to an account. The options appear in the general Options panel, separate from the Account section. You do not need to log in for them to apply.
  • It does not store paste content. It only affects the language and expiration fields on the creation form.
  • It does not affect encryption. Encryption is handled by the separate Encrypt Paste option, where you enter a password or leave it blank. Persistence has no bearing on whether a paste is encrypted or what password is used.
  • It does not change how long a paste actually lives. The expiration you pick at submission time governs that; persistence just pre-fills the picker.

Why this matters in practice

If you regularly paste in the same language and with the same lifetime — for example, always pasting shell scripts that should expire after a day — turning both options on means you can skip re-selecting them each time. If you paste in varied languages or want each paste to have a deliberately chosen expiration, leaving them off avoids accidentally carrying over a previous choice.

One caveat worth knowing: because persistence pre-fills the form, it is easy to submit a paste without noticing the expiration is still set to something short like Ten Minutes. If a paste disappears sooner than expected, check whether a remembered expiration was in effect.