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.
— Tosbourn (@tosbourn) December 10, 2018
This is useful for things like Apple Notes, which doesn't have a horizontal rule feature.
pic.twitter.com/utmFCsDnJC
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.