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.

I thought of the idea for this post after tweeting about one of my more recent snippets:

A fun @TextExpander snippet I've created and been using recently is typing 80 followed by three dashes, this will generate 80 dashes.

This is useful for things like Apple Notes, which doesn't have a horizontal rule feature.

pic.twitter.com/utmFCsDnJC

— Tosbourn (@tosbourn) December 10, 2018

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.

---