#Textexpander colon workaround full#
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If you’re not currently using TextExpander, you can skip this section, but the good news for current TextExpander users is that it literally takes about a minute to export all your existing snippets and then import them into PhraseExpress. I’m pleased to say this proved a big success, and really has helped manage my email inflow.

My jury is still out on whether or not this is a net time-saver, but it has led to the more on-the-ball PRs sending me pitches that address one of my stated interests, so I’m sticking with it for now. I thus tried an experiment of responding to uninteresting ones with a form reply which asks them not to follow-up and gives them a list of bullet-points of things that do and don’t interest me. The more persistent PRs will send a second and sometimes a third email ‘just circling back’ to see whether the thing that wasn’t of interest last week has magically become interesting a week later. The sheer volume of emails would suggest that the only sane way to handle them is simply to delete the ones that don’t interest me – but this creates its own problem. The majority of these are either not remotely relevant to me, or simply insufficiently interesting to cover.

#Textexpander colon workaround professional#

I mentioned last time a professional application.Īs a tech writer, I get a lot of PR companies emailing me with details of new products and services they’d like me to feature. You can use a specific trigger, which defaults to the tab key in PhraseExpress, but I find the double-period approach faster. The latter is to guard against accidental triggering. for address, the initials of our building) Cannot be inadvertently activated in normal typing.I wanted macro shortcuts to meet three criteria: Now I type four characters and the whole thing unfurls.įour characters, by the way, is a deliberate choice on my part. I include directions for public transit, cycling and driving, and the whole thing amounts to seven paragraphs. An example is giving visitors our address and directions. Many of us will need to send the same text relatively frequently.

#Textexpander colon workaround free#

So when I spotted PhraseExpress, a Mac app which works in the same way as TextExpander but is free for personal use, or offers a one-off cost for commercial use, it seemed worth taking a look. In practice, that’s of limited value as iOS doesn’t support the macros, so the best you can do on an iPhone or iPad is to open the app and manually copy and paste the text. In principle, TextExpander gives you something worthwhile in return for the subscription: cloud storage of all your macros (‘snippets’ in TextExpander terminology) so you can access them on any device. On the other, multiple app subscriptions can easily stack up to a hefty annual amount … On the one hand, I do appreciate that recurring revenue is good for app developers, and increases the likelihood that an app will continue to be supported and improved. TextExpander has been a game-changer for me, but it’s a subscription app, something about which I have mixed feelings.

#Textexpander colon workaround full#

You type a macro shortcut of your choice, and the app replaces it with a full block of text – with can be multiple paragraphs. Both apps can be thought of as autocorrect on steroids. PhraseExpress is a Mac app that does the same thing as TextExpander, which I reviewed back in 2017.