TextExpander snippets I like

I’ve been using TextExpander for many years to help reduce the amount of duplicate typing I need to do. I use it both on my Mac and on my iPhone.

If you’re interested, I’ve written a TextExpander review

It is one of the few tools that I still use in an old “Mac Apps I use to stay productive” post.

This post is a list of some of my most favourite / most used snippets, feel free to borrow them and feel free to comment below with your favourite snippets.

These are in no particular order.

Making a horizontal rule

A lot of applications don’t support generating a horizontal rule. This is a shame because often a big dirty line is an excellent way to visually split up some thoughts.

abbreviation: 80---

output:

---

Telling people I’m going to lunch

I work remotely a lot of the time, and as a courtesy to the folk I’m working with, when I pop out for lunch I like to let them know.

abbreviation: brbl

output:

brb, lunch 🍖

The current date

This is handy for quickly naming a file or generating a date in text.

abbreviation: ddate

output (example):

2018-12-08

Replying to recruiters who spam us

Recruiters often play a numbers game when trying to get candidates, as such you often get pretty generic messages because you happen to have came up on a fairly random search. Oh you wrote some PHP 7 years ago, you’ll be perfect as a senior PHP developer. etc.

abbreviation: recruiterno

output:

Hi there,

Thanks for getting in touch.

This link explains our current status: https://tosbourn.com/recruiters/

A unique email address for testing

Often when testing something I’m working on, I have the need to generate a unique email address. Using the + trick with gmail I can generate an email address with a unique part to it which I can still receive email from.

abbreviation: tugmail

output (example):

toby.osbourn+20181208203502@gmail.com

Export

If you want to use these for yourself, here you go.

Please do comment below with some of your favourites.