There’s no question, though, that TextExpander is distinctly faster at making new text-only snippets, mainly because it has special commands for doing so. The snippet expansion is plenty speedy for me. I don’t have hundreds or thousands of snippets, only dozens, so I haven’t run into any of the problems Peter Lewis, Keyboard Maestro’s developer, has warned about. I’ve found no significant difference in using Keyboard Maestro instead of TextExpander. TextExpander’s fill-ins have the advantage of letting you see your input in the context of the rest of the snippet, but Keyboard Maestro’s prompt dialog is more compact, especially when the snippet as a whole includes a lot of boilerplate text with only a few variable parts. There are pros and cons to this approach. Snippets that used fill-in fields were rewritten to make use of Keyboard Maestro’s Prompt for User Input action to save a string to a variable that’s later included in the text output. And I had only a handful of them, anyway. Keyboard Maestro uses ICU formatting strings instead of the more familiar (to me) strftime-inspired formatting codes in TextExpander, but it wasn’t hard to translate. The date and time snippets were easy to rewrite. The only snippets that had to be redone by hand were my date and time stamp snippets and those that used TextExpander’s fill-in feature. Moving my TextExpander snippets to Keyboard Maestro was relatively painless, thanks to Ryan M’s excellent migration script. I agree with Gabe’s sentiments, both before and after the price change.
I won’t recapitulate the changes in TextExpander that prompted me to make the change-you can read those old posts for that-other than to say that Smile’s later reduction in price for TextExpander didn’t persuade me to stay with it. Now that I have a couple of months of this new system under my belt, I thought it was worth a followup post. You'll know exactly what I meant.Next post Previous post Final thoughts on switching from TextExpanderīack in April, I wrote a few posts on switching from TextExpander to Keyboard Maestro as my snippet expander (I was already using Keyboard Maestro for other things). Inevitably, there's a moment of frustration, bafflement and gobbledygook as I type, "T pl is th y use wv" -and get only "T pl is th y use wv."īut now that I've shared my secret with the world, it won't matter.
Typeit4me fill in software#
The only time auto-expansion gets in my way is when I use somebody else's computer, where there's no expansion software installed. Surely you've got various standard signoffs for e-mail, like "xoxo, Chris" or "Respectfully yours, Christianne." Surely, at the very least, you type your address over and over again (or pieces of it, when you fill out Web order forms). Typing-expansion programs are so fast and effortless that I can't understand why everybody's not using them. It's fantastic if you use Twitter, where every character counts. Just copy some huge address, for example, and then type "/bitly" into any program TextExpander pastes in a tiny URL (like ) without your having to open your Web browser and visit a URL-shortening site. TextExpander can shorten long Web addresses as you type. And I can rip through e-mail much more efficiently, since I can re-use so many words and phrases. I don't worry about typos nearly as much. This much is for sure: because I've got these programs installed, I can type *much* faster than a normal person (because I've got so much less to type). That's why I've gone the shareware/freeware route. I want it to work in my e-mail program, browser, sticky-notes app, word processor, spreadsheet, on the desktop, and so on.
That is, I can click just after a "w" I typed earlier if I add a "v," it expands to "Windows Vista." With the shareware programs, by contrast, you have to type the whole thing at once, *followed* by a space or punctuation so it knows you're finished with the abbreviation.īut Microsoft's AutoCorrect has a big downside, too: it works only in Office.
That arrangement has one profound advantage: the expansion happens even when you're editing. Of course, you can get the same effect within Microsoft Office (Mac and Windows), using its AutoCorrect feature. (TypeIt4Me is also available on the iPhone.) On Windows, it's programs like AutoHotKey, ActiveWords and Texter. On the Mac, programs like TypeIt4Me, Typinator and TextExpander do this job.
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