For reference, I’m currently experimenting with triggering only after a Tab press, a la TextMate tab-triggers. I have a few more general snippets, though, so that’s what I’m sharing. ![]() Most of my snippets are specific only to me, such as email signoffs and abbreviations for companies I work for. There are quite a few programs that do text expansion (see Typinator), but TextExpander currently holds my heart because of its extra features such as shell scripting, completion suggestion and a new Fill dialog for variable input. Not familiar with TextExpander? It’s a Mac utility that expands short snippets into full text you’ve defined. And it’s really annoying to see this update sheet appear on a machine that can’t install the update.I’ve seen a few people around the ‘net sharing their TextExpander snippets, so I thought I’d join in. But I can’t take advantage of the Dropbox syncing if only one of my computers has that feature. Of course, TextExpander 2.x still runs just fine on the iBook, so it’s not like I’ve lost anything. Now, the latest version of one of my workhorse utilities for text won’t run on it. I haven’t replaced the iBook with a newer MacBook because I like its form factor and much of what I do on it is text-based, which doesn’t need a lot of computing power. I don’t know if the Smile On My Mac folks have been listening to Brent Simmons, but this restriction is very disappointing to me. So I’m generally happy with the upgrade, but there is a sore point: TextExpander 3 requires Snow Leopard, and one of my computers is a iBook G4, and it can’t run Snow Leopard because it doesn’t have an Intel processor. Multiple fields will let you use a single snippet to the do the work that used to take several. You could create a snippet that put the cursor at a spot in the middle of the text after expansion this gave you the effect of a single fill-in-the-blank field. When one of these snippets is triggered, it pops up a window with the text, and you fill in the empty fields, tabbing from one to the next as you type.Įarlier versions of TextExpander had a less useful version of this. Snippets with several fill-in-the-blank fields will be great for certain types of boilerplate text. I haven’t been able to test this, for reasons that I’ll explain later, but if it works it will remove one minor frustration: typing an abbreviation defined on your other computer and not seeing it expand. If you work at more than one Mac, you can keep your snippet library in your Dropbox folder and it will automatically sync across your machines. Syncing via Dropbox is pretty self-explanatory. The two big improvements in TextExpander 3 are multi-computer syncing of your snippet library via Dropbox and snippets with several fill-in-the-blank fields. (TextExpander is, I think, not quite as versatile as the snippet facility built in to TextMate, but it’s getting closer with every update. ![]() It’s a great utility, and I use it a lot. You can also define snippets (that’s what TextExpander calls its abbreviation/full expansion combinations) for the current date and time, as well as snippets that insert the output of AppleScripts or shell/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc. ![]() So if you do a lot of writing on, say, Castigliano’s Second Theorem, you could define an abbreviation like “c2t” that would expand out to the full expression. You define both the abbreviations and what they expand into to fit the type of writing you do. TextExpander is a utility-it was a Preference Pane, but now it’s a regular application-that expands abbreviations automatically as you type. It has some distinct improvements over the previous version and one disappointment. Smile On My Mac released a new version of TextExpander this week.
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