Applications
My tricks with TextExpander
12/12/08 06:41
Having installed it a while back, I've just started
to find out the joys of using TextExpander. I'm not
really finding it that useful for inserting boiler
plate text which is I guess it's primary use. It
really does help me out with a few other things
though.
I love all the services that are available in OS X, but using the special character menu is a real pain because it is so slow. Just using TextExpander I don't need to go through the special character menu, I just set the application up so that when I type gpi text expander inserts a π.
A while back, I blogged about creating Applescripts which insert references into a document. Not having to look up references made my life a lot easier, but with text expander it is now even easier. I can now just type refcarranzatorres and the reference is automatically inserted:
Hoek-Brown failure criterion - 2002 edition, 2002, E.Hoek; C. Carranza Torres; B. Corkum, Proc. NARMS-TAC Conference, Toronto, 2002, 1, 267-273, www.rocscience.com/hoek/references/H2002.pdf.
This saves a fair bit of time, but more than that it suddenly takes almost no effort to insert a reference into a document. Not only does this improve the quality of reports but any digital work can become well referenced. Even Cocoa or Applescript code written in Xcode can now include equation references as comments with almost no effort.
To round off TextExpander as one of my killer applications, I use MathMagic to create a beautifully formatted equation and then paste it straight into TextExpander. All I have to do is type eqBartonQ and a get a nicely formatted version of the famous Q equation by Barton:
If you haven't tried it, give TextExpander a go, it really is one of those Apps that starts paying for itself as soon as you open it and just get better and better the more you use it.
I love all the services that are available in OS X, but using the special character menu is a real pain because it is so slow. Just using TextExpander I don't need to go through the special character menu, I just set the application up so that when I type gpi text expander inserts a π.
A while back, I blogged about creating Applescripts which insert references into a document. Not having to look up references made my life a lot easier, but with text expander it is now even easier. I can now just type refcarranzatorres and the reference is automatically inserted:
Hoek-Brown failure criterion - 2002 edition, 2002, E.Hoek; C. Carranza Torres; B. Corkum, Proc. NARMS-TAC Conference, Toronto, 2002, 1, 267-273, www.rocscience.com/hoek/references/H2002.pdf.
This saves a fair bit of time, but more than that it suddenly takes almost no effort to insert a reference into a document. Not only does this improve the quality of reports but any digital work can become well referenced. Even Cocoa or Applescript code written in Xcode can now include equation references as comments with almost no effort.
To round off TextExpander as one of my killer applications, I use MathMagic to create a beautifully formatted equation and then paste it straight into TextExpander. All I have to do is type eqBartonQ and a get a nicely formatted version of the famous Q equation by Barton:
If you haven't tried it, give TextExpander a go, it really is one of those Apps that starts paying for itself as soon as you open it and just get better and better the more you use it.