Not anymore ‘zmedium’ now does it for me. This rarely differs, which means I’d always have to manually copy and paste it into each Ulysses document during the writing process. If you’re reading this blog post on Medium, you’ll spot my call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the article. Now, I just type ‘zorange’ or ‘zgreen’, and I’m done. It might be an instruction for a designer, or while editing a video and inserting a graphical overlay, but before TextExpander, I’d have to seek out those hex codes manually. I have two brand colours to which I need to refer regularly. Before TextExpander, I’d head into my pinned Apple Notes to grab my video description template, copy the text and paste it into YouTube. That’s a lot of filming and editing, but it’s also a lot of typing. I publish either two or three videos on YouTube every week. Here are my favourites, which might offer some inspiration for any new – or seasoned – TextExpander users out there.įavourite snippet 1: YouTube video description template For instance, my list of snippets has grown from the three previously mentioned to 20, and most of them I could never have predicted until their repetitive nature suddenly dawned on me. My shipping address, email address, and YouTube description template were the most obvious, and immediately saved me some time once turned into snippets.īut the wonderful thing about TextExpander is the way you continually discover reasons to use it. When I first installed TextExpander, I thought I’d only have a couple of uses for it. Saving mere seconds when you recall your snippets might not feel like much, but add up those instances across a week, and you’re gaining back serious time. TextExpander is incredibly powerful but in such a satisfyingly simple way. It’s even possible to create snippets that tell the cursor exactly where to land after insertion. What’s more, you can add date and time macros, math, and special characters.
The idea is that you can save common words, sentences, paragraphs, or even images, for instant recall, rather than adding them by hand. For instance, if I want to add my shipping address to an email, I simply type ‘zadd’, and it appears, instantly.
TextExpander refers to these keystrokes as ‘abbreviations’ and the content to which each one is linked is known as a ‘snippet’.
#Textexpander app mac#
It’s an omnipresent app on your Mac which enables you to summon pre-written content with a couple of keystrokes. The premise behind TextExpander is super simple.
#Textexpander app software#
Thankfully, I found TextExpander and… yeah, you guessed it – this simple piece of software has changed the game for me, big time. Whether it’s my email sign-off, shipping address, or the consistent elements of my YouTube description template, if I could have £1 for every time I’ve typed the exact same sentence of text, I’d be a very rich man. This has long been the case with entering repetitive text. Worse, still, I know I’m doing it, yet it often takes me an awfully long time to do anything about it. I’m terrible for this – I do it all of the time. You know when you suddenly realise that you keep undertaking the same task again, and again, and again?