Inside you’ll be able to create basic expandable snippets. To find it, head over to the Keyboard palette and click on the Text tab. It’s not as powerful as a standalone app, but Apple has actually baked text expanding abilities into OS X since Mountain Lion. If you don’t want to pay anything to speed up your typing, there’s a way to do it right inside System Preferences. 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. 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. 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. From the abbreviations to the actions, everything is customizable down to the character. 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. But even if you just use it for its text expanding abilities, longtime TextExpander users will appreciate its versatility. 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. Additionally, Ettore offers a TypeIt4Me keyboard for iOS, matching TextExpander’s cross-platform support. TypeIt4Me’s unique menu gives you access to all of your clippings, letting you insert them with a click rather than a shortcut. Snippets are given abbreviations for easy expanding, but you don’t actually need to remember them. But the app doesn’t bog you down with complicated menus. Compared to TextExpander, TypeIt4Me keeps it super simple, with a clear input window that mimics the ease of an OS X Settings pane.Īll of the usual options are here: rich text, picture, date, time, autocorrection, etc. 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. While its interface may have changed, its core concept hasn’t. 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. If you’re looking for the original text expander, you might be surprised to learn it actually isn’t TextExpander. 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. But just because it doesn’t reside in the Dock doesn’t mean it isn’t as full-featured as TextExpander. Unlike most of its peers, Typinator is strictly a menu bar app.

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.

Simplicity and speed are the main features of any text expanding app, and Typinator (€25) has them in spades. 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. The interface is hyper-focused on organization, neatly arranging your snippets by groups for easy editing. Like TextExpander, aText’s greatest strength is the time it saves with the automation of monotony. Dates, images, and formatting can also be added to snippets, and handy auto-correction tools can help with capitalization and misspellings. 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. Setting up snippets is as quick as using them, and aText gets you started with a few common examples.

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