My Favorite OS X add-ons: TextExpander

Did you ever have to type the same word or phrase over and over again? I think we all do sometimes; your name under an email, a piece of code or even a whole email message in reply to a frequently asked question. TextExpander, by Smile on my Mac is a great add-on which will help you whenever you’re in a situation like that, and belongs to my group of favorite OS X add-ons because it’s so easy to use and fits in the system perfectly.

TextExpander resides in the System Preferences. You can create ‘Snippets’ in which you define what string of characters should be replaced by what. So for instance I can tell it to write “Thank you very much for your kind email” whenever I type “tthanks”. It also writes the date or the time when I type “ddate” or “ttime”, respectively.

A great feature of TextExpander is the possibility to tell it where the cursor should be after inserting your phrase. Normally you’d want it to be at the end of the text of course, so you can continue typing. But what if you’re writing code and you have to write between tags a lot? You can tell TextExpander to leave the cursor exactly where you want it to be. It can even insert the contents of the clipboard into your text!

Textexpander can be downloaded from the Smile on my Mac website. There’s a free trial, and if you decide to buy it it’s $29,95, or €24.94.