Hey guys, I’m curious about this particular issue and would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on this.
I was lucky enough to get an iPad Pro 12.9” & Magic Keyboard in August for turning the big four-o
I’m a big fan of Textexpander and have been ever since moved to macOS however I’m finding myself a little uneasy trying to find the best way of using the magic keyboard and Textexpander together.
Currently, I have the Textexpander app in the iPad dock and switch over to it, use a note and copy & paste my required snippet. Not ideal.
Another solution I’ve been using is iOS text replacement for a few of my snippets like my email. Again, not ideal and I find it doesn’t always offer the snippet as a replacement.
How is everyone else using both the magic keyboard and textexpander using them together?
I would love to hear about your experience to date.
Short answer: you can’t. TE does not work with physical keyboards, so either you have to use workarounds like you do which is very clunky, or you have to use TE-enabled apps like Drafts, Ulysses and such.
You can get to your on-screen keyboards when an external keyboard is attached. You may want to monkey with the order of the keyboards to make TE first.
Yes, you could invoke the onscreen keyboard as well with previous versions of iOS as well but that remains clunky. You need to type on glass with a keyboard attached. Not an ideal solution (but Apple does not provide keyboard interception at this stage on iOS).
Yeah, we can boil it down to: TE is an on-screen keyboard only, but it does still work as an on-screen keyboard when you have and external keyboard attached; although, that’s a bit clunky.
@gerrymcil I feel your pain. I only use my iPad with an external keyboard so I have had to adapt my workflow. I am using a 7 year old email app called Dispatch that still works perfectly with full TextExpander fill-in support. For text entry, Drafts 5 is of course awesome and can be the initiation point for a lot of apps that support url schemes. Other good text apps with full TextExpander support are Byword ( a great distraction free writing app that also provides blogging capability to wordpress and medium), Editor from OMZ, and Textastic. GV Connect has full TE support if you use Google Voice and text a lot on your iPad (I do while I work). Of course, the top tier programs like Omnifocus 3 and Fantastical 3 both offer full TE support. If Spark would add TE support, it would join OF & F as a top tier app imho. Your workflow can get done with an external iPad keyboard you have to just pick the right apps.
I have been communicating with Readdle and they at least asked for a follow up on examples of workflows. Then I got the “we will pass this along to the devs and get back to you with any news of adding this feature” email. It kind of makes me angry as I can tell they are using TextExpander in their support emails. There are telltale signs in sentences constructed with Fill-In snippets. So they know how useful it is and still have not implemented it. Thank goodness Dispatch still works fine in iOS 13. I am afraid to upgrade to iOS 14 though. I wonder if that is the IOS version that finally kills my email app. Sigh. The battle continues.
yeah, the devs seem to have fallen off the map. I have tried to contact both of them on Twitter but they do not reply. I guess they didn’t pay their $99 so Apple removed the app from the store a few years ago. I have the .ipa file backed up so I can reinstall it whenever I need to. I protect it like gold bullion.
by the way, in case you didn’t know, Dispatch has callback links to archived emails that work great with DEVONThink. I never used this feature before (I just searched the archive) but as a new DEVONThink user I am trying it out. Its really cool.
It’s been interesting reading all the comments above.
It appears to be as I thought, clunky workflow.
The main thing for me was that out there somewhere in the big bad world someone had the perfect setup. However, it looks like we’re all in the same boat!
I have emailed and tweeted the developers of Dispatch numerous times to get it back in the app store but so far, not even a response. They are still active with their Due app but refuse to even answer me about Dispatch and how to get it back into the AppStore.
I only use it like email. I use it to bother developers about supporting TextExpander in their apps. Smile should really pay me some kind of evangelist fee.
