I’ve seen people use it for simple text expansion and replacement, and I’ve seen people use it for automating entire tasks to the press of a button. AHK is open-source and is basically a free scripting language that can do, well, basically anything. Unlike Phrase Express, it is not cross-platform, which is unfortunate, because it’s extremely powerful. Auto HotkeyĪuto Hotkey is one of the more popular text expanders for Windows. Pricing ranges from about $50 to about $200, one-time fees for lifetime licenses, with additional costs for “maintenance”, which includes program updates. In addition to a free limited version, they have three versions licensed for commercial use with escalating ranges of features. One of their more clever features is the ability to translate entire phrase trees into different languages for cross-language work. In addition to a huge array of snippets, you can sync snippets across platforms and even share them with team members. Phrase Express is one of the more robust entries on this list, with a ton of features that make it great for personal and for business use. That’s why I’ve put together this list fifteen different options for text expansion apps you can use to put those clever hacks into use. Textexpander is a good app, but it’s not the right choice for everyone and every purpose. Many people also use preconfigured text blocks to insert things like your name, address, and phone number, turning a full NAP block into something as simple as typing and hitting Enter. Higher tier usage allows you to use common commands to add symbols you’d otherwise need to look up and copy-paste into a document. They all have varying capabilities and pricing levels, but they all do basically the same thing they allow you to type a short word or key-phrase and have it automatically replaced with a full block of text.Īt the most basic level you have an autocorrect feature that capitalizes words and acronyms for you. Textexpander is one of many text replacement tools available on the web. If your purchase was made after January 1, 2015, you are eligible for a free upgrade.Elsewhere on this site, I covered a variety of different hacks and tricks you can implement using a tool like Textexpander. TextExpander 5 is a USD $19.95 paid upgrade from version 4 if your purchase was made prior to 2015. If you already own TextExpander touch, the 3.5 release is a free update, just check in the App Store for updates, or if you update automatically, you might already have it installed. Guess what I've been writing about lately. Both of these features can be disabled, if it turns out they aren't actually helping you. If you type out the text of something you have as a snippet you get nudged with a notification that includes the abbreviation to help you remember and build muscle memory for that new snippet. This same feature can also remind you of snippets you've created. Aside from the JavaScript snippets and expanded syncing, you also get Suggestions, a feature that takes notice of something you've typed repeatedly and suggests via Notification Center that maybe you should create a snippet for that. TextExpander 5 for Mac includes some new features as well. If you have // used TextExpander for awhile, you probably have a reasonably vast library of snippets and search makes it a lot easier to figure out if you need to make a new one or have one you forgot about. This is mostly a developer feature, because this support means that other apps can now work in conjunction with TextExpander touch to build automation for example using Drafts or Workflow to build a string of actions that make it easier to send a standard email or take notes.Īnother feature new to TextExpander touch is Search, which only existed on the Mac version previously. TextExpander touch has also added support for x-callback-url functions. If you have built some nifty scripting snippets, or wanted to but TextExpander didn't support them, JavaScript is now supported on both Mac OS and iOS, so your snippets should work on both sets of devices. One of the biggest new features to come to both apps is expanded syncing options: Now snippets can be synced using any Dropbox folder, iCloud Drive, or whatever other cloud syncing service you would rather use.Īnother notable feature that has come to both versions is JavaScript snippet support, including JavaScript for Automation. Both include improvements to existing features, and some new features outlined below: TextExpander for Mac has been upgraded to version 5, and TextExpander touch was updated to version 3.5. Two big updates came from Smile Software on Wednesday, both to "type things for me" app TextExpander.
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