Introduction

It’s been several years since I first installed TextExpander on my Mac in preparation for writing the first edition of this book. At the time, I liked to run my Mac with as few add-on software utilities as possible, if for no other reason than to understand the experience that most Mac users have.

However, TextExpander has changed my life—at least my working life. I write for a living, and a lot of the stuff I write about is hard to type—weirdly spelled, strangely capitalized—or all too easy to mistype. TextExpander has saved me from much of that: every time I type ttx instead of TextExpander, or ;js instead of JavaScript, or awatch instead of Apple Watch, or tco instead of Take Control, my work flows a little more smoothly, and every time I type Tonay instead of Tonya when corresponding with my editor (Tonya, you have no idea how often my fingers do that against my will), I save myself a heap of embarrassment.

And then there are the emojis and the symbols that I can type without having to bring up the Mac Character Viewer, and the little productivity aids such as the boilerplate fill-in snippet I use when Apple issues its quarterly financial report and I help write the article summarizing the latest results for TidBITS (which, by the way, I can type as Tidbits): I can’t tell you how much time TextExpander has saved me with all of these things.

Actually, I can tell you: TextExpander keeps statistics (click Statistics on the TextExpander window’s toolbar), and so I know that I have saved typing over a quarter of a million characters since I first installed the app, which comes out to me having saved more than a full working day of typing time at 80 words per minute. (I can also tell you the most often expanded snippet I have used this month…not surprisingly, it is ttx for TextExpander.)

Even though I still keep my Mac as free from add-ons as possible, TextExpander is one that I don’t want to live without. Revising this book has been a pleasure, since it helped reacquaint me with some TextExpander features I had forgotten (such as the hotkey to convert a text selection into a snippet quickly), as well as introducing me to some new useful ones: inline search, where have you been all my life?

If you are an experienced TextExpander user, I hope this book helps you rediscover the great capabilities TextExpander offers that you may have forgotten. And if you are new to TextExpander, I hope this book helps you take full advantage of this delightfully useful app.

There’s a good chance that TextExpander can change your life, too.