Text Expansion – Kill Keystrokes, Save Time

The leveraging of work done in the past gifts us time and effort saved at the keyboard. How many times do you find yourself producing repetitive runs of text? A simple example would be an email signature, another might be the standard letter, often taken care of with a template using Pages or Word. Wouldn’t it be a fine thing to summon either with a simple stroke key combination based around the task?

Textexpander (TE) and Typinator perform these tasks for you and it is difficult to overemphasise how incredibly useful they are. A common tribute to them usually comes in the form “whenever I change machines the first app I install is Textexpander”. That’s certainly been my experience, from TE everything flows, I use it many times during every session at the keyboard. TE sits in the background totally integrated into everything I do – simple. As it works you can’t help but smile. Building snippets is fun, many within the Mac community freely share their snippets – some of these are ingenious. Try out MacSparky’s and for the technically inclined, Brett Terpstra’s.

The creator/narrator on the clip above is David Sparks. With his buddy Katie Floyd he runs Mac Power Users, a podcast for MacGeeks which they have forged into a popular resource for their listeners. David has produced a fine series of TE video tutorials for Smile.

Typinator is broadly similar with a more complex user interface.  I started out with Textexpander, in consequence have used this app less but it looks and works very well. Usefully, Typinator can import and use Textexpander snippet libraries as can a Windows equivalent, Phrase Express.

Discover for yourself the capabilities of these powerful tools to see how they will save hours of repetitive typing – even transform your workflows.