Share and Sync Snippets

Some of us can remember a time when it was a radical idea to imagine that an ordinary person could own a computer. Now, though, many people not only own one computer, but several, both stationary and mobile; for example, a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet, a phone, and maybe even a few others (your author blushingly admits to having a half dozen computers of various kinds around his home as well as a few other retired machines stashed in his Vault of Antiquity—they seem to reproduce like tribbles).

If you use multiple smart devices, and you employ TextExpander regularly on more than one of them, you might find it useful to share a master snippet collection among them. If so, read this chapter.

Export Your Snippets

You read earlier, in Save a Copy of a Group, how easy it is to save a file containing a snippet group. Although there’s no equally easy way to save your entire snippet collection, you can certainly save the most important snippet groups to put on another of your machines—especially if you have a relatively small number of important snippet groups.

Getting your snippet groups into TextExpander on a different Mac is also simple, and it is described in Add a Group from a File and in Add a Group from a URL. If you have access to a file server or a Web server that your computers can access, saving the groups that you need from one computer and adding them to another is certainly a viable way to spread your snippets among your machines.

However, keep in mind the following caveats:

• Snippet groups that you add from URLs cannot be modified unless you duplicate the group, and groups added from files can be modified only if you import them as local copies.
• Any changes that you make to the snippets on one machine won’t appear on any of the other machines, so unless you make changes only on one master machine, and replace the shared groups with updated copies when you do, your snippet groups will quickly fall out of sync.

All told, saving and adding groups is best when you have a set of snippets that don’t change. It’s also a great way to distribute a common working set of snippets among coworkers.

However, to be sure that all of your devices have the same set of snippets, saving and adding groups is not the best way to go. Instead, what you really want to do is sync your snippets using a cloud service.

Sync with the Cloud

Cloud services for file sharing, such as iCloud Drive, Dropbox, and Google Drive, have become extremely popular, and it’s only common sense to use one of them to share your snippets among multiple devices. TextExpander understands common sense: you can sync your snippets from just about any cloud service that you can reach from your Mac.

Here’s how TextExpander’s cloud syncing works: you point TextExpander at a folder on your chosen service, TextExpander copies your Settings.textexpander file to that folder, and, from that point on, TextExpander uses that file as your TextExpander settings file instead of the one found in ~/Library/Application Support/TextExpander/Settings.textexpander.

Here’s how to set up TextExpander to sync through a cloud-based file-sharing service:

1. On the Mac that has the snippet collection you want to sync, choose TextExpander > Preferences > Sync (Figure 37).

   

2. Do one of the following:
   • Click Link to Snippets: Choose this if you have already stored your snippets on a cloud service. TextExpander presents a standard file dialog (Figure 38) with which you can navigate to the snippet settings file stored on that service. Select the file and then click Open. The snippets on your device are replaced with those stored in the cloud.

     

   • Click Save Snippets As: Use this when you want to sync your TextExpander settings to a new service, or to a different folder on a service, for the first time. TextExpander presents a file saving dialog: name the file (or accept the proposed name, “Settings”), navigate to where you want to store the settings file, and then click Save.
   • Sync with TextExpander 4 or TextExpander touch 3.2.4: Check this box if you need to sync your snippets via the Dropbox service with a device running an earlier version of TextExpander. This places the settings file in a folder named TextExpander on Dropbox, creating the folder if it doesn’t exist. If another device has already saved its settings in this folder, you’ll see the dialog in Figure 39. In that case, click Replace Dropbox data to replace the settings stored on Dropbox with yours, or click Link to Dropbox to replace your settings with those stored on Dropbox.

     

3. For each other Mac on which you want to sync TextExpander data through Dropbox, repeat Steps 1 and 2, and then, if necessary, click Link to Dropbox in the dialog that appears (Figure 39, above).

Helpfully, TextExpander shows you the path to where your settings are currently stored in the cloud right in the Sync preference pane, as you can see in Figure 37, a page or so back.

And what if you no longer want to sync your settings? Click Don’t Sync in the Sync preference pane. The settings from the cloud service are then copied and stored locally on your Mac, so you won’t lose any snippets you are accustomed to having.