TextExpander 3
March 11th, 2010 at 10:59 pm
Smile On My Mac released a new version of TextExpander this week. It has some distinct improvements over the previous version and one disappointment.
TextExpander is a utility—it was a Preference Pane, but now it’s a regular application—that expands abbreviations automatically as you type. You define both the abbreviations and what they expand into to fit the type of writing you do. So if you do a lot of writing on, say, Castigliano’s Second Theorem, you could define an abbreviation like “c2t” that would expand out to the full expression. You can also define snippets (that’s what TextExpander calls its abbreviation/full expansion combinations) for the current date and time, as well as snippets that insert the output of AppleScripts or shell/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc. scripts. It’s a great utility, and I use it a lot.
(TextExpander is, I think, not quite as versatile as the snippet facility built in to TextMate, but it’s getting closer with every update. And it can be used in any application.)
The two big improvements in TextExpander 3 are multi-computer syncing of your snippet library via Dropbox and snippets with several fill-in-the-blank fields.
Syncing via Dropbox is pretty self-explanatory. If you work at more than one Mac, you can keep your snippet library in your Dropbox folder and it will automatically sync across your machines. I haven’t been able to test this, for reasons that I’ll explain later, but if it works it will remove one minor frustration: typing an abbreviation defined on your other computer and not seeing it expand.
Snippets with several fill-in-the-blank fields will be great for certain types of boilerplate text. When one of these snippets is triggered, it pops up a window with the text, and you fill in the empty fields, tabbing from one to the next as you type.
Earlier versions of TextExpander had a less useful version of this. You could create a snippet that put the cursor at a spot in the middle of the text after expansion; this gave you the effect of a single fill-in-the-blank field. Multiple fields will let you use a single snippet to the do the work that used to take several.
So I’m generally happy with the upgrade, but there is a sore point: TextExpander 3 requires Snow Leopard, and one of my computers is a iBook G4, and it can’t run Snow Leopard because it doesn’t have an Intel processor. I don’t know if the Smile On My Mac folks have been listening to Brent Simmons, but this restriction is very disappointing to me. I haven’t replaced the iBook with a newer MacBook because I like its form factor and much of what I do on it is text-based, which doesn’t need a lot of computing power. Now, the latest version of one of my workhorse utilities for text won’t run on it.
Of course, TextExpander 2.x still runs just fine on the iBook, so it’s not like I’ve lost anything. But I can’t take advantage of the Dropbox syncing if only one of my computers has that feature. And it’s really annoying to see this update sheet appear on a machine that can’t install the update.
That’s just rubbing it in.
March 15th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
I have a similar setup (with a mac mini that can’t run Snow Leopard). However, I’ve used the Smile on my mac way from before they added support for Dropbox. It has worked for a while and still works.
Takes away that bit of frustration :)
March 15th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Tanja,
Thanks for reminding me of the symbolic link thing. I should have mentioned it in my post. I did, in fact, try that method of syncing sometime last year, but it didn’t work for me. My library of snippets on one machine or the other kept getting wiped out. After a few tries I gave up.
I’d be willing to try it again, but with TE 2 on one computer and TE 3 on the other, I’m afraid some library incompatibility would arise. Have you upgraded one of your machines to TE 3? And have you added any snippets that use the new features?
March 16th, 2010 at 4:07 am
It took a few tries to get it to work properly for me. I now have TE2 on my mac mini and TE3 on my macbook. I mostly use the macbook. The snippets sync fine, but obviously, the new features don’t work on the mac mini. The fill-fields show up as text.
For me this is not a big issue, I don’t use the mac mini that much, but I can see how it’s a problem when it’s (one of your) main machines that can’t run the update. I wish TE3 was at least Leopard compatible. Up to a certain level I can understand the decision to not support older OS versions, but Leopard isn’t just any old version, it’s the last one that still works on PPC . That should count for something.
March 16th, 2010 at 8:57 am
Tanja, thanks for the info. I’ll give it another try.