Text Expander (Official Thread) App

Type more with less effort! TextExpander saves your fingers and your keyboard, expanding custom keyboard shortcuts into frequently-used text and pictures.

Share your snippets and scripts.

 

Text Expander changed the game for me. I use it for a lot of repeated tasks for my podcast like a template for show notes, commonly used URLs, and a list of basic tags we use for iTunes and YouTube. I also have a list of snippets for writing to insert clean markdown links using my clipboard or the frontmost open tabs.

It's sort of amazing how much time you can save using this sort of software.

 

;chair = (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

 

I also use it a lot for Markdown. I think the most used Markdown thing I use is a AppleScript service that I have assigned to a hot key, so I can highlight a word and hit command+shift+L and it'll link that word to whatever is on the clipboard. I have command+shift+k set to give me a menu of all my open tabs so I can quickly paste links as well.



A lot of my TextExpander is for things I type a lot, some misc stuff:



I use that ppt one a whole lot to keep crappy formatted text from being copy/pasted.

My fanciest one is probably the one I just wrote to use on Chorus, it takes the words on the clipboard, makes them lowercase, puts + instead of spaces, and then creates a Markdown link to the tag page on chorus for that world. That way I can type a band name, cut it, hit ;', and it'll paste a perfect MD link to the tag page for that band.

I do a lot of the same stuff as @Jacob Tender for podcast or posting repetitiveness. One of my most used apps for sure.

 

I didn't even think to use this for show notes templates. Gonna have to go set that up! I still forget to use it a lot just because I'm so used to typing everything out. Definitely an app that's underused for me.

 

I definitely forget things like ;sw for Star Wars all the time, which could definitely save me a decent number of keystrokes. I really like it for blocks of text or markup that I get sick of typing. I'm setting up some bbcode snippets for use here.

 

I'm going to have to ask you for some of those scripts.

 

Yeah I feel like one day I just really need to sit down with it and set it up to where I'd be more inclined to use it.

 

Shit, I thought I linked to some of them in that post, my fault.

Markdown Service Tools - BrettTerpstra.com

I've modified a few, but if you're writing in Markdown, those are great!

Sidenote: God, I love Markdown.

The get links from tabs script I modified from Gruber's one he made for Safari. But, if I remember right you use Safari.

Paste URL From Safari Tabs · GitHub

 

Thanks for the links. I was using one of Doctor Drangs scripts to grab pretty links from the open tab in Safari. Gruber's looks handy too.

I couldn't live without Markdown. What editors do you use most?

 

On the Mac, TextMate 2 (or sometimes Byword), on iOS, Editorial and Drafts.

I have an unhealthy obsession with text editors. Hahaha.

 

I'm almost strictly Byword on my Mac. (I wish OmmWriter would have kept going and supported markdown.)

Same on iOS, but I really want to learn how to use Editorial for expanding Workflow's capabilities. For instance, a decent selection-to-textshot to share on Twitter seems to only be possible with a little bit of Python.

 

The app Linky is pretty cool for stuff like that.

I really like Byword, with a nice monospace font and typewriter mode. Recently I've been using Textmate 2 for basically everything though, it's just such a nice and customizable experience for throwing text into it and being able to manipulate it in ways I need for news posting.

Like I can quickly past a long list in, hit a few keys, and add bullets to everything in the list, or wrap each line in certain code for posting tour dates ... and it's become one of my most used apps.

 

I'll give those a go.

 

@Jason Tate I just noticed the dotted underline style for hyperlinks within a quote box. Nice touch.

 

Linky is almost perfect. Text shot support for iBooks and other apps would be amazing. Great suggestion.

 

Thanks. Yeah, I wanted to include them in the post, obviously, but also the regular underline stood out too much. So that was my solution.

 

I waffle back and forth on link styles. Some days I'm "under links are ugly, give me a different color." Other days I like the readability of a consistent color and if an underline indicates these words take you somewhere, so be it.

 

This is MacSparky's TextExpander Snippet library. The review template has given me some great ideas.

 

I don't think this is gonna go over well.

 

Hmm. Maybe there's more information on desktop view, but does this mean there is no free tier? I've found no reason to pay for any upgrades yet but would like to see a UI that's a little more fresh.

 

You can keep TextExpander 5 without paying the monthly fee but they're not guaranteeing compatibility with future OS updates. At least that's what I understood from the MacStories post.

 

Right, I was more interested in whether or not the new Text Expander will have any free functionality or if everything is locked under a pay-wall.

 

Gotcha. I got the feeling it's all paid and no free tier. Although, depending on how people react to the news, there's a chance that could change. I don't use it nearly enough to pay monthly for it. When I went to the pricing section one of the features was "free app updates" yet you're paying monthly so I wouldn't consider that free hah.

 

I thought this was a good post about it all:

TextExpander 6 (Or: “How NOT to launch your SaaS”)

But is this just another case of “Users are cheap and don’t value developers’ time?” I don’t think so. I happily signed up for 1Password for Families which will eventually be $5/month, although I could have gotten away with using the app as I have previously. There’s no question that this will be (slightly) more expensive for me in the long term, but after using it for a few days it was obvious that 1Password for Families was going to save me time and frustration. In fact, it was so good that I even said to a few people “I could imagine using 1Password for Families even as an individual, just for the bonus features.”
There’s the rub for Smile and TextExpander: I don’t see anything that I really need in TextExpander version 6. I’m not using it with a “team” and my family members probably have no interest in sharing a group of text snippets with me. Yes, I realize that Smile made their own syncing service, but I have used iCloud, Dropbox, and BitTorrent Sync, and they work fine for TextExpander. Creating their own syncing service was solving a problem that I didn’t have.