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Version 2.30.3 for Mac. With aText you can easily avoid typing the same thing over and over. Insert images, formatted text into any application, such as Pages, Mail, Google Chrome Gmail. Automatically capitalize new sentences, correct double capitals. QuickKey: Easy Text Expansion for Mac Save time typing by expanding short abbreviations into entire e-mails, code snippets, or often repeated paragraphs. QuickKey allows you to insert expanded text into any app with a simple keyboard shortcut. In my research for best text expansion apps for macOS, I came across heaps of text expanders on App Store; While almost every text expander app for macOS is paid, they do vary a lot in terms of features, ease of use and cross-platform support.
TextExpander lets you instantly insert snippets of text from a repository of emails, boilerplate and other content, as you type – using a quick search or abbreviation. You’re in Good Company Contact me for details about how to store your snippets in the cloud or share snippet groups with your team in real time!
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For as long as we’ve been using Macs to type repetitious bits of text into emails and documents, there’s been TextExpander. One of the original alphabet automators, the typing shortcut utility has been at the beck and call of writers and coders for generations, dutifully filling in tedious lines and phrases, and saving precious seconds throughout our day.
Even at $45, TextExpander was one of the most essential and popular utilities on the Mac, but a recent change to its pricing structure has longtime users feeling scorned. Smile made the surprising move to a subscription service rather than continue its longstanding policy of paid upgrades, and even after a backlash-induced change of heart that lowered the annual rate to $40 for new users and $20 for current customers, it will still cost something of a premium for access to TextExpander’s snippets.
TextExpander might be the most popular expansion service, but it’s certainly not the only one. If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative or just one without such a long-term commitment, check out these apps.
aText
aText ($5) might not have TextExpander’s brand recognition or breezy interface, but it stacks up in just about every other way. Calling itself a text accelerator rather than an expander, the affordable app lives up to its billing, speeding up your typing by offering myriad shortcuts for the things you write.
Setting up snippets is as quick as using them, and aText gets you started with a few common examples. Simple, clearly labeled fields will get your workflow up and running in seconds, storing chunks of text that will expand whenever and wherever their accompanying abbreviations are typed. Dates, images, and formatting can also be added to snippets, and handy auto-correction tools can help with capitalization and misspellings.
Like TextExpander, aText’s greatest strength is the time it saves with the automation of monotony. The interface is hyper-focused on organization, neatly arranging your snippets by groups for easy editing. You can also create fill-in-the-blank templates that can make the most tedious of forms a breeze, and if you have more than one Mac, Dropbox and Google Drive integration will keep your snippets synced across all of them.
Typinator
Best Text Expansion App For Mac
Simplicity and speed are the main features of any text expanding app, and Typinator (€25) has them in spades. With easy drag-and-drop organization and a powerful set of expanding options, Typinator won’t just replace your reliance on TextExpander, it’ll make the transition effortless.
Unlike most of its peers, Typinator is strictly a menu bar app. But just because it doesn’t reside in the Dock doesn’t mean it isn’t as full-featured as TextExpander. Text disappears while typing mac in skype for business. An expansion can be as simple as setting “tn” to expand to Typinator, but it can go a whole lot deeper than that, with case specification, cursor positioning and a whole word option that only expands phrases when the next typed character is neither a letter nor a digit, protecting against accidental inserts.
Beyond common text snippets, Typinator can be trained to perform calculations, or insert the current date and time, as well as create interactive pop-up boxes for fill-in form letters. There are a healthy amount of predefined sets, and code tinkerers can try their hand at regular expressions, which add a unique level of power to your snippet library. Based on the International Components for Unicode, it allows users to create complex expansions that are triggered under much more specific circumstances than a hotkey or phrase.
Dash 3
The average user can find myriad ways to save valuable time using text expanders, but for coders they can be an absolute life-saver. Cutting down on the number of times a string or variable needs to be typed can make or break a deadline, and while any of the text expanders here can be configured to help, only Dash ($30) makes it its primary mission.
You can use Dash to expand any bit of text, but it’s built to speed up the coding process by cutting down on the thousands of tedious instructions that need to be written. Even before you start adding snippets of your own code, the app will speed up your programming with an exhaustive catalog of language documentation that is accessible from the sidebar. Fully searchable and customizable, it provides an indispensable database of rules and references that will sharpen your syntax.
Anything you see can be easily turned into an expandable snippet by copying it and using the create new snippet from keyboard command. Snippets are sortable by programming language and searchable by context, and can be as interactive as you need them to be, with cursor positioning, date and time stopping, and variable placeholders.
TypeIt4me
If you’re looking for the original text expander, you might be surprised to learn it actually isn’t TextExpander. TypeIt4Me ($20) has been storing snippets and expanding text since the days of System 6, and it’s every bit as useful today as it was back then.
While its interface may have changed, its core concept hasn’t. TypeIt4Me is just as easy to use as it was on the day it was launched, with a menu bar- or Dock-based system of snippets (or clippings, as they’re called within the app) that can quickly be added to your document. Compared to TextExpander, TypeIt4Me keeps it super simple, with a clear input window that mimics the ease of an OS X Settings pane.
All of the usual options are here: rich text, picture, date, time, autocorrection, etc. But the app doesn’t bog you down with complicated menus. Snippets are given abbreviations for easy expanding, but you don’t actually need to remember them. TypeIt4Me’s unique menu gives you access to all of your clippings, letting you insert them with a click rather than a shortcut. Additionally, Ettore offers a TypeIt4Me keyboard for iOS, matching TextExpander’s cross-platform support.
Keyboard Maestro
Keyboard Maestro ($36) won’t just fill all of your text expanding needs, it’ll turn your keyboard into a veritable launchpad that will speed up everything you do on your Mac. But even if you just use it for its text expanding abilities, longtime TextExpander users will appreciate its versatility.
You can use Keyboard Maestro to make a basic macro that turns a string of letters into a line of text, but expert expanders will want to dive into the array of options available. From the abbreviations to the actions, everything is customizable down to the character. For example, when setting a snippet to be pasted rather than typed, you can tell Keyboard Maestro to return the clipboard to its prior contents, so whatever you had manually copied isn’t wiped out.
Text tokens make macros infinitely more powerful by adding fields for things like calculations, dates, IP addresses and mouse location, and you can also program how your macro works within specific apps, or set snippets to expire after a set period of time. By piggybacking actions you’ll be able to expand your text in pretty much any way you can imagine whether you’re automating words, sentences or entire pages of type.
System Preferences
If you don’t want to pay anything to speed up your typing, there’s a way to do it right inside System Preferences. It’s not as powerful as a standalone app, but Apple has actually baked text expanding abilities into OS X since Mountain Lion.
To find it, head over to the Keyboard palette and click on the Text tab. Inside you’ll be able to create basic expandable snippets. It’s text expansion at its most rudimentary, but if you’re solely interested in saving time while typing, it’ll do the trick.
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Strangely, Mac OS X has a wide variety of great text expansion apps and everyone does the job well. That said, aText is our favorite thanks to its comprehensive feature set, great performance, and reasonable price.
aText
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: $5
Download Page (Mac App Store)
Price: $5
Download Page (Mac App Store)
Features
- Type a short snippet that can expand to styled or unstyled text of virtually any length (and include pictures)
- Insert several types of variables into snippets, including date, time, other snippets, the clipboard, and more
- Create snippets that receive input from fillable forms
- Create snippet groups that respond to input in different ways
- Specify special behaviors for specific applications
- Easily back up your snippets to any folder
- Expand by typing or by choosing a snippet from the menu
- Invoke AppleScripts and shell scripts
- Reposition the cursor in a snippet so you're typing where you want to post-expansion
- Emulates key presses (e.g. tab, backspace, etc.)
- Import data from TextExpander, TypeIt4Me, and Automaton Typer
Where It Excels
Despite the very low price for aText ($5), it's remarkably comprehensive. It offers mostly the same feature set as bigger apps like TextExpander for a fraction of the cost. Text expansion works as expected, you can specify when specific groups of snippets should expand, and you have the ability to include so many variables that one little snippet could, potentially, create a unique letter or document. If you use another text expansion app, there's a good chance aText imports its data. It doesn't cost much, it does practically everything, it's simple to use, and it's easy to switch from other popular solutions if you're interested.
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Where It Falls Short
While aText isn't short on features, one notable omission is the ability to sync snippets. While you can specify a backup folder, to which aText saves a backup of your snippets at a specified interval, you can't choose where it actually saves the original copy. This means you can't sync with services like Dropbox or Google Drive, making aText a somewhat less-desirable choice for those with multiple computers. Personally, I use it with two machines but find it a bit of a hassle to manually make the updates. That said, it's a small price to pay when you're already getting so much for such a small price. Additionally, Tran (the developer) tells me that syncing support is a forthcoming feature so it shouldn't be long until this isn't an issue at all.UPDATE: aText received an update that now allows syncing via any folder syncing service like Dropbox or Google Drive.
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The Competition
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TypeIt4Me ($5) was our former top pick. It packs quite a punch for $5, too, but doesn't offer as many variable options (like fillable forms) as aText. It does offer a number of unique features like autocorrect, however, so it's worth a look if you want something a little different from most of the competition at a very low price.
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Text Expander ($35) offers a few more features than aText, and a mobile app that's crippled by iOS' rules and restrictions. While TextExpander is a fantastic alternative—and, in some ways, better—it's not a better value than aText. You'll pay seven times more for a very similar experience.
Typinator (24.99€) offers a similar feature set to the other text expansion apps but its price has only gone up. While it is, at the moment, slightly cheaper than TextExpander it doesn't work quite as well. When filling out custom form variables, for example, if the form window loses focus (i.e. you click outside of it) it just disappears. I contacted the developer about this issue and was told it's impossible to fix. TextExpander doesn't have this problem, and when I found the same issue in aText its developer fixed it in less than 24 hours.
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DashExpander (Free, $3 Premium) has an unusual interface and can be a little weird to use at first, but is nonetheless a solid text expansion app. It's also your only free option, so if you don't want to pay anything at all it's the only way to go. While we still really like it, when our first and second choices only cost $5 we highly recommend supporting these developers by paying such a small fee for their excellent work.
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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