I’ve been a text expander customer since MPU first twisted my arm enough times to buy it and then later become a subscriber.
I’d like to eliminate that expense from my life. But I’m not sure if there’s really a better solution that isn’t a bunch of hacks and/or Mac only.
99.9% of my use for it is a couple of different styles of date expansions. I’ve been using it some for templates in Obsidian, but I think that is easy enough to replicate using the Obsidian plug-in.
Does anyone have any success or failure stories in trying to move on from TE?
Moved to Typinator. It’s Mac only but it’s not a subscription, it does everything TE does in date math, fill-in snippets and all advanced uses. There’s an importer from TE so the experience was pretty seamless. I much prefer Typinator, which is way snappier than TE - and it incurs no recurring cost for no valid reason.
I’ve almost bought KM several times, but I never quite have the time to wade through the demo version to understand how to use it. Maybe that’s a project for the summer.
I dropped Text Expander last year. I thought I wanted to use it on the iPad way more than I actually did. I switched over to aText, which has been doing alright. It’s not worse than Text Expander in my uses so far.
+1 for Typinator (and everything that Ergonis makes). I used TextExpander before I knew about Typinator, and dumped TE as soon as I tried Typinator. The app interface alone was a selling point – TE always felt like someone’s hobby app. Typinator is well designed.
Waaaaay back I used TypeIt4Me (which is still around). Then, because everyone spoke about it (and some swore by it), I moved briefly to TextExpander, but never really liked it (specially because it blocked on some sites from time to time). Then tried Typinator and never looked back (since 2009).
TextExpander and PDFpen are, in my opinion, way too hyped for their worth.
Agree on PDFPen. 5 or so years ago they were solid, but went steady downhill. So many bugs and random crashes. I used to buy it every year until I made the switch to PDF Expert about a year ago. It has been rock solid.
Dropped TE with no regret. Paid & tried a few alternatives and settled for Alfred mainly not wanting to have too many apps running. Alfred’s very powerful multi purpose app and hard to ignore. Typinator and RT are both very good alternatives to TE.
+1 and really afraid of digging yet another rabbit hole. Am sure 1 day will give it a good test run.
The problem I have is that they went subscription and then justified the pricing change by promising new feature development. Reached out to support after seeing nothing for a year and they said things like “new exciting font released in version x.x”. Gee…. Thanks Smile. Cancelled and went with aText. Don’t use windows so cross platform support wasn’t a problem for me…
Does Typinator work in Craft notes? Text Expander doesn’t, at least for me. Since I’m using Craft now for most writing, I’m missing a more full-featured snippet expander.
Typinator for me also and was a long time TE user. All of the reasons that were listed make it a great alternative.
Plus, if you contact their support, they will help you re-write any scripts that didn’t work in the transition over to Typinator. I had a couple of scripts that just wouldn’t work and they took time to rewrite it for me so it worked in Typinator.
Honestly, I’ve been using TE for a long time (used to be an affiliate, even). I was fed up with the lack of development and tried Typinator one night on a whim. I was blown away by how fast it is. I never looked back.
