You’ve seen how to use the normal TextExpander application interface, complete with Dock icon and menu bar, and you’ve seen how to use the TextExpander quick-access menu interface, which offers most of TextExpander’s features and capabilities from a single icon menu.
With OS X services and TextExpander hotkeys, however, you don’t even need to clutter your menu bar or Dock with TextExpander icons if you don’t want them: you can get much of the TextExpander functionality you need right from your keyboard.
This chapter tells you how to set up OS X services to enable the snippet creation and editing commands on the TextExpander quick-access menu. It explains how those commands work, and it shows you how to set up hotkeys so you can use those commands—and others—without reaching for your mouse or trackpad at all.
Pardon me while I make a brief excursion into OS X geekery. Trust me, I’ll be brief, and you don’t have to understand why you need to do what I’m going to tell you to do in this short section. In fact, you can skip the next paragraph of background information if it makes your head spin: just follow the steps that follow it, and all will be well.
TextExpander’s quick-access menu provides commands for creating new snippets, including Create Snippet from Selection. This command makes a snippet from text that you’ve selected in another application, such as a phrase in a word processor or a passage on a Web page. TextExpander uses an OS X system service to communicate between the app in which you’ve selected the text and TextExpander’s snippet creation feature. TextExpander installs this system service the first time you run TextExpander. However, before you can use the Create Snippet from Selection command, you must enable the service; while TextExpander can install the service, it can’t enable it on its own.
Before you can use the Create Snippet from Selection command, do the following (if you don’t, you’ll see the dialog in Figure 33):
From now on, you can use the useful Create Snippet from Selection command with impunity.
As you have seen in other parts of this book, with TextExpander’s quick-access menu you can access all of your snippets, create new ones, search them, and more. However, using the menu interface requires that you move your pointer to the menu—if you are in a creative frenzy, with your fingers dancing productively across your keyboard, reaching for your trackpad or mouse can be an annoying distraction. With hotkeys, you can avoid that distraction.
A hotkey is a character key typed in conjunction with one or more of the following modifier keys: Option, Shift, Command, and Control. Like keyboard equivalents for menu commands used in many Mac programs, hotkeys can invoke a variety of TextExpander-related actions. Figure 34 shows the hotkeys you can set in TextExpander’s preferences.
To set one or more hotkeys, do the following:
The hotkey takes effect as soon as you assign it.
You can clear a hotkey just as easily:
You can tell when a hotkey has been cleared, or has never been set: its button reads Click to Set Hotkey.
You don’t need to see the TextExpander window to create snippets. The TextExpander quick-access menu provides three commands for creating snippets, and each of those commands can have a hotkey equivalent:
There are a few limitations and interesting behaviors to keep in mind when you use these Create Snippet commands:
Nobody’s perfect: suppose you expand a snippet and your eagle eye detects that it contains a typo that you completely overlooked when you created the thing. You could open TextExpander, find the snippet among the many that you have in your collection, select it, and then make the fix. However, in cases like this it’s easier to use the Edit Last Expanded Snippet command. This command saves you a trip into the TextExpander window, which can be both distracting and an all-too-tempting excuse for procrastinating.
The Edit Last Expanded Snippet command, available from the TextExpander quick-access menu or from a hotkey you assign, displays a window like the one shown in Figure 36.
Use this window to make any changes you need to the snippet content, to its abbreviation, or both, and click Save.
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