Because of Keyboard Maestro’s superior programming features, I’ve found myself creating new snippets that are more complex and capable than I could ever make in TextExpander. Overall, the switch from TextExpander to Keyboard Maestro has gone much better than I’d expected. And another reason to appreciate Ryan M’s fine work. Given how important my script snippets are to me, that was a black mark against it. Typinator allows all those types of snippet, but it won’t import script snippets from TextExpander (at least I couldn’t get it to do so). TypeIt4Me allows AppleScript snippets but not shell/Python/Perl/Ruby snippets, so it was easy for me to dismiss. I did, by the way, investigate both TypeIt4Me (which I used many years ago) and Typinator as TextExpander substitutes instead of Keyboard Maestro. Since I don’t make new snippets very often, this isn’t an important consideration for me, but it might be for you. There’s no question, though, that TextExpander is distinctly faster at making new text-only snippets, mainly because it has special commands for doing so. The snippet expansion is plenty speedy for me. I don’t have hundreds or thousands of snippets, only dozens, so I haven’t run into any of the problems Peter Lewis, Keyboard Maestro’s developer, has warned about. I’ve found no significant difference in using Keyboard Maestro instead of TextExpander. In a Formatted Text expansion, the built-in DecodeHTML function now produces. TextExpander’s fill-ins have the advantage of letting you see your input in the context of the rest of the snippet, but Keyboard Maestro’s prompt dialog is more compact, especially when the snippet as a whole includes a lot of boilerplate text with only a few variable parts. Typinator can now add and edit links in formatted text expansions. There are pros and cons to this approach. Snippets that used fill-in fields were rewritten to make use of Keyboard Maestro’s Prompt for User Input action to save a string to a variable that’s later included in the text output.
And I had only a handful of them, anyway. Keyboard Maestro uses ICU formatting strings instead of the more familiar (to me) strftime-inspired formatting codes in TextExpander, but it wasn’t hard to translate. The date and time snippets were easy to rewrite. The only snippets that had to be redone by hand were my date and time stamp snippets and those that used TextExpander’s fill-in feature. Moving my TextExpander snippets to Keyboard Maestro was relatively painless, thanks to Ryan M’s excellent migration script. I agree with Gabe’s sentiments, both before and after the price change. I won’t recapitulate the changes in TextExpander that prompted me to make the change-you can read those old posts for that-other than to say that Smile’s later reduction in price for TextExpander didn’t persuade me to stay with it. Now that I have a couple of months of this new system under my belt, I thought it was worth a followup post. Next post Previous post Final thoughts on switching from TextExpanderīack in April, I wrote a few posts on switching from TextExpander to Keyboard Maestro as my snippet expander (I was already using Keyboard Maestro for other things).
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