According to my stats in TextExpander, I’ve saved 8 hours of typing since January. Any names, urls, agenda templates, addresses or even common misspellings can be added to make life just a little bit easier and give you some time back. I’m only breaking the surface with what you can do with a text expansion tool. I use the semicolon because it’s a character that I don’t normally use in everyday writing and it’s never immediately followed by anything other than a space. I don’t want my shortcuts to be something that I may accidentally type when I don’t want them. You’ll notice that I use a semicolon at the beginning of each my snippets. When I’m setting up a meeting, I can type 3 quick characters and get all of my information without having to look it up. cc = My conference call dial-in information Again, I have a separate snippet for my work signature ( sigw). This allows me to turn it off entirely and easily enter my signature when and where I want it. I’ve never liked the automatic email signature addition that a lot of email clients have. I have a separate one ( neww) for my work email. I can go to the address bar and type newp and it will expand into the link. This URL will give me a blank email without taking me to my inbox. This is awesome if you use Gmail as your email client. I just got tired of typing it all the time. Really handy for adding a time stamp to filenames.Īllows me to easily set a start date in Omnifocus for 9am tomorrow morning.Įmail addresses are used all over the place. Here is a cool trick that you can use to quickly store and recall arbitrary text fragments without any scripting. Gives me the time right now in the format of YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS. I use this one a lot for titling a new Evernote note or naming files. Gives me today’s date in the format of YYYYMMDD. It comes with AppleScript support and allows me to sync my snippets across computers. There are quite a few text expanders out there: Phrase Express, AutoHotKey, aText, Typinator, TypeIt4Me. It’s kind of like a keyboard shortcut for text. In other words, it will take td and expand it into today’s date. For example, I have a snippet that allows me to type td (short for today’s date) and it will remove td and replace it with 20140711. It allows you to type a string of characters that will expand into a longer string of characters. Working for a virtual company means most of my communication is through the phone or the computer, so I end up typing most of the day. You already have the latest version of Product.Do you ever find yourself typing the same thing over and over again? Stuff like an email address, the date, a URL, or even a template of some kind? If so, a text expansion app might be just what you need. If we know that the customer already has the latest version, we want to replace this sentence with: The sentence about downloading the new version should be included only if a new version is available. To download the new version of Product, please visit. The boilerplate text could look like this (placeholders shown in italic): We want to enter the name of the customer in the greeting, select the product and choose an option for adding more information about available updates. Let's assume that we want to prepare a text snippet for an e-mail reply when somebody asks about the most recent version of one of our products, Typinator, PopChar, or Ke圜ue. We will start with a simple form and then extend it with more sophisticated features. For a typical use case, we demonstrate how the input fields can be defined, and finally show the resulting expansion in action. The following example gets you started with input fields. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. Or you can use the entered values in calculations. Or you can pass entered values to scripts. For example, you can assign the entered value to a variable, which you can use in different places in the same or other expansions. Input fields are very powerful, as they can be combined with many other Typinator features. Without a default value, Typinator automatically suggests the value that was entered at the last invocation. If you prefer a solution that isn’t a subscription service then you might like to give Typinator a try. TextExpander was recommended by Anders Norn. checkboxes for choosing one of two text fragments (for "on" and "off")įor all these fields, you can specify a default value that is automatically suggested when the field is shown. TextExpander is available for MacOS and Windows and is a tool that helps you create snippets which can be inserted using keyboard shortcuts or common abbreviations.combo boxes for alternatives with an additional free-text variant.pop-ups for selecting one from a number of predefined alternatives.text fields in single-line or multi-line forms.Such forms are created from input fields that you define in expansions. In Typinator 7 or newer, you can create powerful input forms for filling variable parts of expansions.
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