From the great folks over at Smile On My Mac, TextExpander is a great time saver. The utility does just what the name says. It monitors keystrokes and looks for hot keys and/or triggers, then inserts some text.
This base functionality can be used to:
- Setup multiple email signatures
- fix typos
- insert HTML code, or any common code snippets
- insert the current date and time.
The exciting part – TextExpander can do this in any application on the mac. Also, the inserts are not limited to plain text, but can include formatting and images.
Snippets created on one machine can be automatically synced with .mac. The program just runs quietly in the background waiting to help.
A couple of snippets I use all the time are ddate, ttime, ftime, crweb, rrtm, and fimgr. Sounds like gibberish, but each abbreviation above will perform a unique task that I often call upon. ddate expands into the current date in a format I like to use: June 13, 2008. ttime does the same thing for the current time: 1:52 PM. ftime I created because I like to use the current date/time at the end of file names when I’m saving revisions of work, so the abbreviation resolves to 200806131353…or whatever the current date/time is 
crweb is the TextExpander snippet abbreviation I use for the ClubReading blog url, http://www.clubreading.com.
The last two are more specialized. rrtm is a generic email body to my Remember The Milk email inbox so I can quickly create new tasks. It looks like (It’s basically the text from the Remember The Milk help page):
Priority: 1
Due: Monday at 9am
Repeat: Every Week
Estimate: 2 hours
Tags: report coffee
—
This is a heading for the first note.
This is the first note’s content.
—
This is a heading for the second note.
This is the second note’s content.
I’ll talk about Remember The Milk in a later post. I’m just getting started with it, but so far I’m lovin’ it.
The last example I use for blogging. I write most of these posts using TextMate, with the blogging bundle in Markdown. And I generally like to float any images with the post on the right hand side. So I have a TextExpander shortcut that takes the url I’ve clipped to the clipboard and expands the img tag for me. For example let’s say I want to include the book cover for “A Confederacy of Dunces” from the ClubReading Books site in the post. I just grab the image url from the book detail page and type the TextExpander trigger, and the result is:
[<img class="alignright" style="margin: 5px; float: right;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51668m5olUL._SL160_.jpg" alt="BookDetail" />][bookdetail]
As you can see, TextExpander can be a great time saver. I’d like to find a similar product on windows, but those that I’ve tried are pretty limited. I’ll keep searching.
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