![]() Buying the app now, you can get it for $3.33 monthly for the Life Hacker plan, or $7.96 per month per user for the Team version. Let’s take a look at three of the most popular text expander apps.Īvailable Platforms: Windows 7/8/10, Mac OS10.11-10.14, Google Chrome, iOS9+. Stretch that over the course of years and you’ll find yourself with entire days of extra productivity on a monthly basis. What does it save you, 10-15 seconds? Well, once you set it up for 500 different phrases you use every day, dozens or hundreds of times a day, you quickly build up into hours saved. It might not seem like a lot, to save you the effort of typing a few extra words. Since it’s system-level, it works in anything you’re running on your system. You get your “addr” in every app, be it a word processor, a web browser, an email client, or a custom app with no API or integrations available. The difference is, using a text expander app is system-wide. Email has templates that can insert those kinds of expanded features, and there are often plugins that can do the same thing. Now, you might be thinking you can already do that, and you can! Most office programs, for example, have autocompletes added to them already. You could set it up so typing in “addr” inserts your full business address, typing in “tdate” inserts today’s date in a specific format, and “gbye” adds in a standard closing sentence and goodbye to a message. What can you do with text expander apps? Basically, you just plug in snippets and have them replaced with full, pre-configured information. In this case, I’ll be talking about three options specifically: TextExpander, Typinator, and Alfred. Of course, we live in the 21 st century, where capitalism has spurred on an endless array of alternatives as everyone tries to gain their own market share, and as such, there are a lot of different options for everything, including text expanders. You can set them up and customize them as much as you want. It’s like shorthand, except instead of a series of nigh-indecipherable scribbles, you type abbreviations or short words and a program automatically expands them into full words. One such set of tools is the text expander, autofill, or autocomplete style tool. There are so many options out there, it comes down to personal preference what you want to learn and adapt to, and what tools work best with your unique situation. There are of course other options on the Mac (Typinator and Atext are in my head and might be actual apps) that might be viable, but if you want one app to rule them all then Keyboard Maestro might be the best investment.There are a million and one different productivity hacks you can incorporate into your lifestyle and your workflow. If you want something cross platform, even just in the Apple-sphere, then I would say TextExpander is a contender, otherwise it’s a balance against what you’ve got … but I’d place Keyboard Maestro closer to TextExpander functionality than Alfred and would opt for the former for text expansion if choosing between those two. I then switched to Breevy on the Windows side and within six weeks the TextExpander Windows beta came out and I was sold. I previously manually synchronised TextExpander and AutoHotKey so that I would have the same expansions (mostly) in both. Rarely with the soft keyboard, but more with TextExpander enhanced apps. TextExpander on the Mac is perfect for what it does, but if I was only using it there I’m not sure the subscription would be worth it for me. The reason I do is predominantly because it is cross platform. I also have Keyboard Maestro and again it is a fantastic piece of software with a multitude of uses. Alfred is a fantastic application and my Mac wouldn’t be the same without it.
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