Textpander - Reduce finger wear and tear

Oct 04, '05 07:19:00AM

Contributed by: robg


Welcome back, Pick of the Week! After a few months spent exploring the outback of Australia, paddling the fjords of Norway, strolling the Champs de Elysées in Paris, and generally not working, the Pick of the Week (PotW for short) is back and ready to get to it.

During his time away, there have been some changes, of course, so things will be a bit different around here now. Since Macworld has an excellent feature called MacGems that focuses on interesting and useful OS X programs, we've decided to combine the PotW with MacGems. What that means is that you'll still see a PotW here each week (typically on Monday), but you'll see a mix of stuff that's newly discovered by yours truly, as well as pointers to stuff that other Macworld editors have uncovered that I find worth mentioning.

In both cases, I'll post a short summary of the program here, and then link to the full review in the MacGems section of Macworld's site. So while the blurbs here may be a bit shorter than they have been in the past, the articles that I'll link to will provide much more detail, as you'll see if you keep reading.

-rob.

Textpander imageThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]
This week's PotW is from Peter Maurer, author of my all-time-fave utility Butler, which was a PotW way back in December of 2003. One of the features of Butler is a relatively simple macro utility that lets you create text strings that can be inserted with the press of a 'command-key' keyboard shortcut (i.e. shift-control-H, or whatever). While this works quite well, I was looking for something that would automatically expand simple typed shortcuts into full text strings. For instance, if I typed !!rob, I wanted the program to insert the text string With best regards, etc. into the currently active application. I tried TypeIt4Me, but I didn't really like the way it worked. Then someone poined me to Peter's Textpander.

After installing it and using it for only a few minutes, I was hooked. This program has already saved my fingers miles of typing, given the number of things that I type over and over again. It worked great in Carbon, Cocoa, and even Java apps; I was suitably impressed.

For the full story on this very useful program, read my writeup on yesterday's MacGems.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20051004063941156