Mac Create Text Snippets For Any Application

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• Mac Create Text Snippets For Any Application Letter

Through the years I’ve tried every snippets app I could fin, paid for a few, cried when some died. The art of capturing and storing snippets of text falls into two categories. Those who use snippets as notes, and those who use snippets of code as programmers or developers. On the Mac, it’s really easy to create a snippet. On iOS you have to open the app and fill out the new snippet form. Luckily there is another way: the URL scheme. TextExpander’s URL scheme offers a method for creating new snippets. The Pro Edition can additionally store text snippets in the native Microsoft Word format to include Word macro functions or embedded Excel spreadsheets, etc. PhraseExpress provides you with extra flexibility: PhraseExpress is not limited to a particular Office Suite but works in any application, e.g. For filling web forms, chat sessions or custom database applications.

Strangely, Mac OS X has a wide variety of great text expansion apps and everyone does the job well. That said, aText is our favorite thanks to its comprehensive feature set, great performance, and reasonable price.

aText

Platform: Mac OS X
Price: $5
Download Page (Mac App Store)

Features

• Type a short snippet that can expand to styled or unstyled text of virtually any length (and include pictures)
• Insert several types of variables into snippets, including date, time, other snippets, the clipboard, and more
• Create snippets that receive input from fillable forms
• Create snippet groups that respond to input in different ways
• Specify special behaviors for specific applications
• Easily back up your snippets to any folder
• Expand by typing or by choosing a snippet from the menu
• Invoke AppleScripts and shell scripts
• Reposition the cursor in a snippet so you're typing where you want to post-expansion
• Emulates key presses (e.g. tab, backspace, etc.)
• Import data from TextExpander, TypeIt4Me, and Automaton Typer

Where It Excels

Despite the very low price for aText ($5), it's remarkably comprehensive. It offers mostly the same feature set as bigger apps like TextExpander for a fraction of the cost. Text expansion works as expected, you can specify when specific groups of snippets should expand, and you have the ability to include so many variables that one little snippet could, potentially, create a unique letter or document. If you use another text expansion app, there's a good chance aText imports its data. It doesn't cost much, it does practically everything, it's simple to use, and it's easy to switch from other popular solutions if you're interested.

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Where It Falls Short

While aText isn't short on features, one notable omission is the ability to sync snippets. While you can specify a backup folder, to which aText saves a backup of your snippets at a specified interval, you can't choose where it actually saves the original copy. This means you can't sync with services like Dropbox or Google Drive, making aText a somewhat less-desirable choice for those with multiple computers. Personally, I use it with two machines but find it a bit of a hassle to manually make the updates. That said, it's a small price to pay when you're already getting so much for such a small price. Additionally, Tran (the developer) tells me that syncing support is a forthcoming feature so it shouldn't be long until this isn't an issue at all.UPDATE: aText received an update that now allows syncing via any folder syncing service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

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The Competition

Mac Snippet Shortcut

TypeIt4Me ($5) was our former top pick. It packs quite a punch for $5, too, but doesn't offer as many variable options (like fillable forms) as aText. It does offer a number of unique features like autocorrect, however, so it's worth a look if you want something a little different from most of the competition at a very low price.

Snippets For Windows

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Text Expander ($35) offers a few more features than aText, and a mobile app that's crippled by iOS' rules and restrictions. While TextExpander is a fantastic alternative—and, in some ways, better—it's not a better value than aText. You'll pay seven times more for a very similar experience.

Typinator (24.99€) offers a similar feature set to the other text expansion apps but its price has only gone up. While it is, at the moment, slightly cheaper than TextExpander it doesn't work quite as well. When filling out custom form variables, for example, if the form window loses focus (i.e. you click outside of it) it just disappears. I contacted the developer about this issue and was told it's impossible to fix. TextExpander doesn't have this problem, and when I found the same issue in aText its developer fixed it in less than 24 hours.

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DashExpander (Free, $3 Premium) has an unusual interface and can be a little weird to use at first, but is nonetheless a solid text expansion app. It's also your only free option, so if you don't want to pay anything at all it's the only way to go. While we still really like it, when our first and second choices only cost $5 we highly recommend supporting these developers by paying such a small fee for their excellent work.

Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.

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You can follow Adam Dachis, the author of this post, on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Twitter's the best way to contact him, too.

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Text-expansion utilities let you create abbreviations—also called clippings or snippets—for frequently typed text. When you type one of these abbreviations, the utility automatically replaces it with the respective full text. Snippets can be words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or even bits of code. For example, when we type mw, our text-expansion utilities expand those two letters to Macworld, saving a few keystrokes each time. When Dan types addy, his utility immediately replaces it with his home address. While the keystrokes these abbreviations save may not seem like much on their own, the hundreds—or even thousands—of keystrokes you avoid add up every day. In this way, a text-expansion utility can save you significant time and effort.

Two of our favorite such utilities are Smile’s $35 TextExpander for Mac () and Ettore Software’s $27 TypeIt4Me (). The two programs are quite similar, and each uses a similar procedure for setting up abbreviations: In TextExpander, you open the program’s main window and click on the New Snippet (+) button; then you enter your full text in the large section of the right-hand pane, and your abbreviation at the bottom-right of the window. You can also name your abbreviation (for example, Home Address) to make it easier to find in TextExpander’s lists. In TypeIt4Me, you open the program and click the New Clipping (+) icon; then you enter an abbreviation in the left-hand column and the expansion text in the right-hand side of the window.

But how can you use a text-expansion utility to increase your day-to-day productivity? Here are a few of our favorite tips for TextExpander and TypeIt4Me.

Mac Create Text Snippets For Any Application Letter

The basics

Start simple. Set up abbreviations for things you frequently type: Your full name, your address, your phone number, and even your favorite email signatures. You type these things frequently enough that you’ll start using their abbreviations—and being more productive—quickly.

Online shopping shortcuts Mac users can use Safari’s auto-fill feature or 1Password to automatically fill credit-card numbers and addresses when shopping online, but some sites actively prevent these tools from working—plus there are times you may need to provide that information in other apps. You can set up a snippet for each of your credit cards and use those snippets to paste your credit-card numbers on demand—it’s a lot easier to remember ccamex (for an American Express card) or ccmc (for MasterCard) than each card’s number. (Note that you probably don’t want to use these snippets on a laptop that you travel with, or a public computer, as anyone could read your credit card number by opening the text-expansion program.)

If you find yourself often filling out forms with, say, your name, address, and phone number, you’ll generally find that these forms have the same number of fields. It turns out that TextExpander and TypeIt4Me allow you to include tab characters within snippets, so you can set up a snippet in the format name, tab, street address, tab, city, tab, zip code, tab, phone number. As long as the fields are in the correct order, that snippet will let you enter all the information with just a few keypresses.

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Faster site searching If you frequently search a specific website, you may know that you can use Google to search just that site using the syntax site:[sitename] [search string]. You can use this trick along with a text-expansion utility to create site-search shortcuts. For example, we search Apple’s Support site (support.apple.com/kb/) frequently enough that it makes sense to have a shortcut for this search. Dan has set up a snippet for site:support.apple.com/kb/ (with a space at the end) and given it the abbreviation kbs (for Knowledge Base Search). Whenever he’s in his browser’s Google-search field, or on the Google site, he can type kbs Lion Recovery, for example, to search Apple’s support area for information about Lion Recovery. (There’s a space at the end of the clipping so you can start typing after it is expanded, and your typed text won’t be appended to the URL.) Make similar snippets for other searches you perform often.

Advanced expansions

Sublime text mac font for windows. For advanced users, both programs also let you create snippets containing AppleScripts, and TextExpander even allows shell scripts. TextExpander’s included Internet snippets include several AppleScript snippets that take the contents of the clipboard—presumably a URL—and process them using the tinyurl.com, tr.im, or bit.ly shortening service in order to get a shorter URL.

Another example, which Dan mentioned in his 2009 review of Plain Clip, is to use a TextExpander shell-script snippet to process clipboard text. (If you’ve downloaded Plain and placed it in your main Applications folder, you can access Plain Clip’s functionality via shell scripts.) Specifically, the following shell-script snippet (which Dan named ptp, for plain-text paste) takes any text on the clipboard, strips it of all formatting, and then pastes it in the current program, replacing the snippet’s abbreviation:

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Alternatively, this version of the shell-script snippet (which I’ve named qtp, for quoted-text paste) performs the same format-stripping action but pastes the resulting text with each line prepended with a quote (>) character:

The magical %| and %clipboard or ⌘

Finally, don’t miss these critical shortcuts for your text-expanding utility: the %| and (in TextExpander) %clipboard or (in TypeIt4Me) ⌘. These are perhaps the most underused features of both TextExpander and TypeIt4Me. In each utility, including %| in a snippet tells the utility that it should place the cursor at that specific location—rather that at the end of the snippet—after expansion. In other words, if a snippet is Thanks for the email, %|. It's good to hear from you., once you type your abbreviation (say, thxmail), the cursor will be positioned immediately after email, so you can type the person’s name. This trick is great for creating snippets where you need to manually add text.

Similarly, including %clipboard (in TextExpander) or ⌘ (in TypeIt4Me) in a snippet tells the respective utility to paste the contents of the clipboard at that location when expanding the snippet. This is an essential tip when you want to use, within a snippet, text you’ve copied or cut.

You can use this snippet trick to quickly create HTML or Markdown code. For example, in TextExpander, you can set up the clipping <a href='%clipboard'>%|</a> (or, if you write in Markdown, [%|](%clipboard)) and assign it an abbreviation. To create a URL link, you just copy a URL in any application, then type your clipping (Kirk uses hrf, Dan uses urlc), and it will be expanded to <a href='URL'></a> (or, for Markdown, [](URL)) with the cursor automatically positioned for you to immediately type the name of the link. TextExpander comes with a number of pre-defined groups of snippets, including a long list of HTML and CSS snippets that can save you a lot of time if you write Web code.

Dan Frakes is a Macworld senior editor. Senior contributor Kirk McElhearn, the author of Take Control of Scrivener 2, writes about more than just Macs on his blog Kirkville and on Twitter.

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