I’ll let you experiment with the others on your own since you know how they work now. That cursor icon holds a ton of other auto-fills like this. You save time from having to type that out each time. Your customers will get that closing line with a hint of customization. Now when you type out that abbreviation, Text Expander will automatically put in today’s name. We want “Date” and then “Day: Monday” Click that and you’ll have that %A in your snippet content. You’ll be given lots of different choices. To get that, click on the cursor icon to the left of the label line. See that %A at the end of the sentence? That’s Text Expander’s way of setting today’s date. The next step would be auto-filling so you can convey some customization in your emails. But what if you wanted to start on the road to true snippet mastery? Your typical snippets are straightforward. Use them when you first start out to save the time and headache of setting them up after adding your 100th snippet. So I might have a snippet called “hrmerge” to talk about merging inside Highrise. At 37signals, I use “bcx” for the start of my Basecamp snippets and “hr” for Highrise to keep them straight in my head. The other trick I use for grouping is within the abbreviation. Grouping them that way makes finding, managing, and updating them painless. Those are all apps that we support at 37signals. So you’ll see Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, etc. I break mine up into groups around the apps I support. Just click that button that says “New Groups”. Creating a new group is as easy as creating a new snippet. To keep them straight, I break them up into different groups. Groupsįrom that screenshot before, you’ll see that I’ve gotten a ton of snippets. It’ll help customers to know if you’re online and when you’ll be replying to them. #Auto text expander new pro#Pro Tip: Include your working hours inside your signature. If your snippets appears, you’re all set with your first snippet! Remember, it’s case sensitive so AB is different from aB. Open up a text doc and enter your new abbreviation. Saving happens automatically with Text Expander. In this case, I put “so” in front of my Support Ops snippets and then follow it up with something I can remember. One other thing I like to point out with abbreviations is to use a key at the front that you don’t typically use. You want to be like Goldilocks and use something just right in the middle. Too long and you’re not going to remember it. The abbreviation is critical. Too short and it’s easy to trigger the snippet accidentally. Then add the abbreviation for it at the bottom. Something that’s memorable so you know what it does when you’re looking through a list of snippets. For me, you can see I’ve got my work address in there for this one. Start with ones you use a lot like your signature, your contact info, and things along those lines. That’ll give you the content area where you can put your snippet. You’ll click on the “New Snippet” button in the top left. You can go with other apps if you’d like but for this one, we’ll be focusing on Text Expander. Plus, each person on your support team can customize them to their tone and writing style. Your snippets aren’t locked into your support app so you can always take them with you if you change. It’s easy to organize snippets into folders and extend them for all sorts of use cases. TextExpander allows you to create “Snippets”, which are bits of text you can insert into an email with only a few keystrokes. So let’s dive in to some nuts and bolts of how I use my snippet app. #Auto text expander new how to#Turning off these shortcuts has been a vexing problem for me.After releasing my Brief Guide to a Better Email, I got a lot of questions about how to use snippet apps and the best way to set them up. To disable the text shortcuts in Safari? Moreover, are the equivalent commands for other apps, such as Mail, that I could use? For example, would it be appropriate to use: defaults write -g MailAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool false For example, could I use the following terminal command: defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool false Perhaps can tell me if his tip about enabling the text expansion will work in reverse and, in fact, if it is also available for other applications. For example, if I decide to delete the shortcuts in the System Preferences pane in order to avoid conflicts it will also delete them on my iOS devices, which is an undesirable effect for me. While it does have significant advantages over the native text shortcuts there are some drawbacks as well. The solution that I've decided to use - at least for now - is to purchase TextExpander, which is a system-wide text shortcut solution. It is the one thing that nudges me back to using Safari instead of Chrome for OSX. I have found this to be problematic, too.
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