![]() Often you’ll realise while you work that something you’ve just typed would make a good snippet. Select the text you are adding to the snippet and format it with the options from that dropdown. The only difference is that the greyed out Text dropdown becomes activated. Creating a Formatted Text SnippetĬreating a Formatted Text snippet follows the exact same process as creating a Plain Text one. Just type your abbreviation into any app to trigger it. With that done, you’ve created your first snippet. Next, assign it a Label something like Email Address is perfect.įinally, add the abbreviation you want to trigger the snippet. For Content: select Plain Text and then enter your email address. Creating an email snippet.įrom the menubar icon, or the main app window, select New Snippet. As an example, lets create an email snippet similar to the one I mentioned above. The simplest way to create new a new snippet is using the main TextExpander app. A great use for this is adding logos and corporate branding to documents or email signatures. With Formatted Text and Pictures you can apply formatting to the text that is kept when it’s inserted. For most situations, Plain Text is what you want. Whatever you insert takes on the attributes of the surrounding text. Plain Text snippets, as the name suggest, insert unformatted text. In this tutorial I’ll only be looking at the first two. Snippets can be either Plain Text, Formatted Text and Pictures or a script. For example, all snippets related to work could use x while all personal ones would use y as a modifier. Tip: As you use TextExpander and create more snippets you might find it useful to start using multiple modifiers with each one being dedicated to a different group of expansions. If you intend to use TextExpander Touch, the iOS app, then an uncommon letter is the simplest choice. Consistency is the key to making it easy to use. To make the most of TextExpander you should pick an abbreviation modifier and stick with it. Semi-colons, full-stops, commas and uncommon letters like x all work well as modifiers.Īnother common abbreviation modifier is to double up on the first letter, for example, eemail or eem as an abbreviation for an email address. This phrase, while still easy to type, is much harder to trigger accidentally. ![]() That is why it is important to use an abbreviation modifier like the semi-colon in em. If my email address snippet was just triggered by em, it would launch all the time without me wanting it to. The drawback, however, is that if an abbreviation is too simple and natural, you will accidentally trigger it without meaning too. Using my above example, em is easy to remember because it uses the first two letters of the word email. TextExpander, more than any other productivity app benefits from simple, natural keyboard shortcuts that are intuitively linked to what they do. To enable it go to the Accessibility menu in the Privacy tab of the Security & Privacy preferences pane and make sure the boxes next to TextExpander and TextExpander Helper are checked. Like most of the other powerful automation apps, TextExpander requires Accessibility access to the Mac. It can be downloaded from Smile Software, the developer. There’s a 30-day free trial after which the app costs $44.95. To follow this tutorial you’ll need a copy of TextExpander installed. In the first tutorial, I’ll explore the basics of setting up and using it. In this short series on TextExpander I will look at getting the most from the app. If you’ve followed my series on Keyboard Maestro you can try recreating what I do with that app instead. While other apps like Keyboard Maestro can achieve similar results, TextExpander’s feature set is more focussed and tailored towards the task. This is a simplistic example and only saves me a few seconds every time, other snippets I use save me a lot more time. This is something that I type at least a few times each day. For repetitive tasks that require entering the same information over and over again, it is an invaluable tool that can save a surprising amount of time.įor example, I have it set up so that when I type the keyboard shortcut em, TextExpander automatically expands it into my email address. TextExpander is a productivity app that uses keyboard shortcuts to automatically insert longer blocks of frequently used text called snippets. ![]()
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