Set TextExpander Options

In the best of all possible worlds envisioned by Dr. Pangloss, all software would be so perfectly designed that every program would satisfy every user without any need for modification or customization. In our less-than-Panglossian world, however, different people have different needs, expectations, and tastes. That’s why most Mac apps have a Preferences command on the app’s menu.

With TextExpander’s preferences you can, among other things, adjust the application’s appearance, its text-expansion and correction behavior, and whether it backs up your snippets automatically.

Manage Your Interfaces

Unlike most applications that are right in your face as you use them, TextExpander does its job behind the scenes while you’re working with another application. Although there are times when you want to interact directly with TextExpander (and much of this book describes how, when, and why you do), usually when you’re using TextExpander you don’t need to see it—and probably don’t want to see it.

TextExpander by default shows its icon in the Dock when it’s running and appears in the list of running applications when you Command-Tab between them. But since it also provides an omnipresent quick-access menu, you can choose the extent to which TextExpander takes up space in your Dock and your list of active applications:

1. Choose TextExpander > Preferences > Appearance.
2. In the Appearance pane, optionally (but recommended) select Show TextExpander in Menu Bar (Figure 26).

   

   This setting, which is enabled by default, shows or hides the TextExpander icon in the right half of the menu bar. As described in Know Your Interfaces, this menu provides an alternative way to get at your snippets and other TextExpander commands, even when the application is in the background.

   You can also use options beneath this setting to specify a different icon for the menu (if you’ve upgraded from an older version of TextExpander, you may prefer to see a familiar icon from bygone days) and to set the width of the menu: a wider menu means a wider Search Snippets field, which can be easier to read if you have a long search string (see Search and Filter Your Snippets). A wider menu also widens the snippet group submenus, making it easier to see each snippet’s contents.

3. Select Hide TextExpander Icon in Dock.

   This is the big setting: when you check this box, TextExpander no longer appears when you press Command-Tab to switch between applications, and its icon no longer shows up in the Dock (unless you have manually put its icon in the Dock, and, even then, the icon doesn’t appear with the associated dot beneath it to indicate that TextExpander is running).

   Moreover, even when the TextExpander window is frontmost, the application doesn’t display its normal menus. Instead, the TextExpander quick-access menu gets a little longer, adding commands for accessing Help and Preferences, for showing the TextExpander menus (which also deselects this option), and for quitting.

   Selecting the Hide TextExpander Icon in Dock option requires TextExpander to quit and then relaunch as a background application, hence the following step.

4. In the dialog that appears, click Relaunch.

   TextExpander quits, the TextExpander menu bar icon vanishes, and then, in a few moments, it reappears.

You may be wondering, “What if I hide the TextExpander Dock icon and don’t choose to show the TextExpander menu bar icon?” Don’t worry—even in your quest for the minimal interface, you can still access the TextExpander window and all the goodies therein. If you have manually put the TextExpander icon in the Dock, a click of the icon shows the window. You can also double-click the application in your Applications folder. Furthermore, you can assign a hotkey (see Use Hotkeys) to show the window.

Set Expansion Options

In Customize Group Settings, you learned how to control when snippets expand with the Expand When setting. In TextExpander’s preferences, the Expansion pane include a similar option that controls expansion from the opposite direction: Expand Abbreviations.

Use this option to specify a delimiter character that you must type following the abbreviation in order for expansion to occur (this contrasts with the Expand When setting, which looks at the character preceding the abbreviation). TextExpander offers several delimiters, including Space, Tab, Return, Escape, and various punctuation characters. You can see the available delimiters, and choose the ones TextExpander looks for. When you specify multiple delimiters, typing any one of them triggers the expansion.

Why use delimiters? The most important reason is that it gives you much greater control over when abbreviations expand, and when they do not. Related to this control is the benefit of being able to create abbreviations that are common words; those words won’t expand unless they are followed by one of the delimiters you have chosen.

To set expansion options, choose TextExpander > Preferences > Expansion (Figure 27).

Your Expand Abbreviations choices are the following:

• Immediately When Typed: As the label states, TextExpander doesn’t look for a delimiter, but expands the abbreviation as soon as you type its last character.
• At Delimiter (Keep Delimiter): Use this option when you want TextExpander to wait until you type the delimiter before it expands the snippet’s abbreviation, and have the delimiter remain following the snippet.
• At Delimiter (Abandon Delimiter): With this option chosen, TextExpander replaces the abbreviation with the snippet only when you type the delimiter, and removes the delimiter, leaving only the snippet. You might want to use this option if you use punctuation characters rather than whitespace characters as delimiters.

To choose which delimiters TextExpander waits for, click Set Delimiters; the dialog that appears presents all the available delimiters from which you can choose.

The following are the less self-explanatory options you can set in the TextExpander Expansion preferences:

• Use Cross-platform Compatible Images (PNG): By default, TextExpander converts images in a Formatted Text, Pictures snippet to Portable Network Graphic format when it expands. If an app (typically, an older one) doesn’t understand that format, deselect this option to have the image be expanded in its original format (such as GIF or JPEG).
• Include HTML Data: When you want a Formatted Text, Pictures snippet to expand in a Web application, such as Gmail, this option helps make sure that the formatting comes along for the ride in HTML form. Select this option if your favorite Web applications don’t otherwise include the text formatting when your snippets expand.
• Restore Clipboard Delay: Previous TextExpander versions used the clipboard as a temporary storage area for snippets when expanding them (after first silently saving the clipboard’s contents elsewhere); the current version does that only for certain older apps (specifically, those built with Apple’s Carbon frameworks, such as Word 2004). If TextExpander does use the clipboard for expansions, you can specify how long TextExpander will wait before restoring the clipboard’s original contents.

Set Auto-capitalization Options

One group of TextExpander preference settings goes by the rather uninformative name, “Options” (Figure 28). Currently, the Options are related to fixing capitalization when you type.

The Options pane provides two kinds of automatic corrections: capitalizing sentences, and eliminating double capitals. The default setting, shown in Figure 28, above, effectively disables the feature.

The following are the Options options:

• Capitalize New Sentences: If you have trouble shifting for yourself and your texts end up looking like bad e. e. cummings poetry, you can enable this option. TextExpander can examine the text near the insertion point (that is, if the app uses OS X’s accessibility interface) to see if that point is in a sentence starting position, and, if so, take appropriate capitalization action.

  For apps that don’t use the OS X accessibility interface (these, typically, are older apps), TextExpander uses a keypress log that it maintains to see if a sentence-ending character has just been typed; however, since this log is reset every time you move the cursor, the capitalization correction is less reliable.

• Double Capitals: This feature can eliminate double capitals for those users who are slow to release the Shift key when typing:
  • Eliminate at Sentence Start: TextExpander tries to correct double capitals at the beginnings of sentences by using the same methods to detect sentence starts that it uses for the Capitalize New Sentences option.
  • Eliminate at Word Start: TextExpander uses its keypress log to detect the starts of new words.
  • Do Not Correct: When selected, TextExpander does not check for double capitals at all.
• Correct Capitalization In: Use this pop-up menu to choose the apps in which TextExpander attempts to fix capitalization. You can specify a list of apps that TextExpander ignores or a list of apps where TextExpander attempts to perform capitalization correction, or you can have TextExpander fix capitalization in all apps.

Back Up Your Snippets Automatically

Given how easy it is to make and modify snippets, you may find that your collection of snippets changes all the time. That can be a good thing—but it can also be a bad thing if you discover that, in one of the many modifications you’ve made to your collection, a snippet that you once created and cherished can no longer be found. Fortunately, TextExpander can automatically back up your snippet data.

Figure 29 shows the TextExpander preferences for creating automatic backups.

Make a Backup

By default, automatic backups are turned on and occur daily with a maximum of five backup files. If you want to change this:

1. Choose TextExpander > Preferences > Backup.
2. Make sure the checkbox for Perform Automatic Backups of TextExpander Data is enabled, and then choose a backup frequency from the pop-up menu.

   You can back up hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

3. Optionally, double-click the Backup to Folder path graphic to choose a new location for storing your backups.
4. Optionally, choose how many backup files to retain from the Maximum Number of Backup Files pop-up menu.

   You can choose from 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, or No Maximum for the number of retained backups. When you reach the specified number of backups, TextExpander discards the oldest one when it creates a new one.

How many backups is too many? That’s not an easy question to answer and depends on how many snippets you have, how big the snippets are (those with pictures are much larger than plain text snippets), how much disk space you have, and how often you modify your snippet collection. The defaults (one backup a day, five maximum) are reasonable for most users.

Restore a Backup

Although you can always restore TextExpander settings from a Time Machine backup (you do use Time Machine, don’t you?), finding the Settings.textexpander file that you want can sometimes be a matter of guesswork. Both the automatic and the manual backups that TextExpander creates are not only labeled with the date and the time that they were made, but also list the number of snippets they contain, which can help you to find the one you want. Furthermore, while Time Machine backs up hourly during the day, at day’s end all backups but the last are purged; as you have seen, you can have TextExpander back itself up hourly and never purge backups, potentially giving you many more backups from which to choose the one that you want.

It’s not difficult to restore a backup. The command to restore a backup is available from TextExpander’s File menu and from the optional Restore icon that you can place on the TextExpander window’s toolbar (consult the first of the TextExpander Backup and Restore Tips, just ahead, for how to modify the TextExpander window’s toolbar).

Perform the following steps to restore your snippets from a backup:

1. Choose File > Restore Data from Backup or click the optional Restore icon in the TextExpander window’s toolbar.
2. In the dialog that appears, click a backup from the list and then click Restore Backup (Figure 30).

Use Suggestions

Long ago, our primitive TextExpander-using ancestors had to guess whether some typed text of theirs had been repeatedly typed enough to warrant snippethood. Similarly, they manually searched for snippets they didn’t quite remember (see Find Your Snippets) only when they had a vague inkling they had made such snippets in the first place.

TextExpander 5, however, can offer suggestions for text you type that might be worthy of elevation to snippet status, and it can remind you if you are repeatedly typing something manually for which a snippet already exists. Figure 31 shows the TextExpander preferences for suggestions.

When you enable Suggest Snippets Based on My Typing Habits, TextExpander keeps track of your typing and posts a notification in Notification Center. Click the notification to see the TextExpander window with the suggested snippet selected in the Suggested Snippets group (Figure 32).

At this point you can do one of the following.

• Click Drop Suggestion: TextExpander removes the snippet from the list and does not bother you about it again.
• Click Keep Suggestion: TextExpander provides an abbreviation field so you can assign an abbreviation to the snippet. The snippet remains in the Suggested Snippets group, but you can move it elsewhere once it has an abbreviation.
• Ignore the Suggestion: If you just go on about your business, TextExpander will remind you the next time you type the suggested text, though it won’t add another instance of the text to the Suggested Snippets group.

You can also use the Suggest When Typing In pop-up menu in the Suggestions pane to have TextExpander either not offer suggestions when you are using the apps you specify, or offer suggestions only when using apps you specify.

The setting Notify Me of the Abbreviation When I Type a Snippet That Already Exists does exactly what it says: it presents a notification when you type something for which you already have a snippet. This can be very helpful, but if you find yourself being reminded so often that it’s annoying, you may want to turn the feature off…or rethink your snippet creation strategy.