Here's the thing: yes,
TextExpander speeds up your typing, but some of us like typing -- and some of us are 120 words per minute. If you're one of the latter, that doesn't automatically rule out that you wouldn't be interested in the venerable TextExpander's speed, but we figured it wouldn't be that much use to us; or so we thought. Doubtlessly, if you are a slower typist, then the speed is the key reason to buy TextExpander -- but it does so much else, it is so useful in other ways, that we are now dependent on it, and wish we'd bought it ten years ago.
Everything revolves around this speeding up, which is done by replacing a short set of letters that you type. You decide what these triggers are, and whatever you decide, when you type them - boom -- TextExpander replaces those letters with anything else you want. What appears is called a snippet, and it can be something you type often, like your email or postal address. If you're an English professor and every single student keeps mixing up William Wordsworth with Emily Dickinson -- well, yes, you should probably examine your teaching methods more -- but you can have an entire paragraph appear whenever you type "xnotagain."
Notice the "x" in that. TextExpander will expand anything you tell it to, anything. If you wanted to make the word "the" a trigger for TextExpander, fine. What the software recommends, though, is that you create triggers that you would never really intend to type. So rather than "the," try "xthe" or ";the" (with a semi-colon). There must be some Greek word that begins with "xthe," but the odds are that you'll be fine. A quick glance at our remarkably-growing list of triggers shows "xem" expands out to our email address, ";wfc" becomes "Waiting for a call from."
That's the point of TextExpander, or at least it's one of the points. It doesn't take us long to type our email, it doesn't take long to type "Waiting for call from," but we type them so often, and this just gets us moving on to the next thing. Moreover, there is now not one single possibility that we will ever get our email address wrong. It's not likely that we would, but you can see that if you have people's names that you have difficulty remembering how to spell, you could use TextExpander to save you the trouble.
It's also able to save you some bother remembering what today's date is. Honestly, if you can't remember your email address, you can't spell your friend's name and you're not entirely sure what today's date is, then maybe you need more help than TextExpander cab provide -- but think how many times you type the date: not only is it a lot, but you keep glancing at the Calendar in your Dock to make sure it's the 10th and not the 11th, don't you? Every time. Type "ddate," and TextExpander pops in today's correct date for you. That's one of the built-in triggers, and there are plenty of those -- but you'll find that you build up many more of your own.
You'll also find that you start making very complex snippets, where you give TextExpander some information and it uses it across a lot of text. Say you have a form email: you can have TextExpander ask you who you're sending it to today, and after you've typed "Susan" once, bang zoom! There's your entire 60-page email with her name throughout. We have one regular email we send on Fridays, and have set TextExpander to ask us a series of questions that it then pops into the right spots in the email -- and addresses the email too.
This is an unqualified hymn of praise for TextExpander from someone who is a lightning-fast typist, and it is great that software can be so useful that we turn from dismissing it to becoming evangelists. There are two qualifications, though: one is that it does sometimes go wrong. Clearly, TextExpander must be mucking around with your clipboard: we expect that it copies out your clipboard, pops in its snippet and pastes that before restoring your clipboard to its previous state. For sometimes instead of the date appearing, we'll get whatever we last copied. If you delete that and try again, it always works.
The second issue is with the iOS version. This is a longer story, but the upshot now is that you can buy a separate TextExpander touch for iOS, and it uses an iOS 8 keyboard to recognise your triggers. Fine, even great, but the keyboard is harder to use than the standard Apple iOS one, so what you gain from snippets and triggers, you lose in your other typing.
Consequently, we do like and we do use TextExpander touch for iOS, but what we're raving about here is TextExpander for OS X. The Mac version requires OS X 10.7 or later, and
costs $35 from the official website. You'll use it, and come to depend on it so much that you will buy the iOS one as well. The iOS version is called TextExpander 3, and it costs
$5 on the iOS App Store and requires iOS 8 or later.
One last thing. TextExpander includes a usage meter that claims to work out how much time it has saved you. We look at this suspiciously, because it's currently saying it's saved us over 280 hours of typing in the last 19 months. We didn't notice getting 280 hours off.
Who is TextExpander for:
Fast typists and slow ones, if you spend your time at a Mac keyboard, get this.
Who is TextExpander not for:
Hmm. Do you dictate more than type? There's no reason you can't dictate a snippet.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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