TextExpander Crashing

If it’s inappropriate to discuss, why the need for the lengthy explanation? I don’t personally see anything wrong with the recommendations in the past. However, when Smile took TextExpander to the subscription model they justified it with all the enhancements they were going to make they opened themselves and their partners up to all of the criticism.

I have decided to withdraw my post. :wink:

Let’s just say that I personally have no reason to criticize podcasters for how they dealt with Smile, TE and sponsorships. I was brought to TE 10 years ago because of that and I do not regret it. And I have stepped away from TE because of a degradation of quality (my opinion). But this degradation happened later. And my experience is that there are podcasters (and the MPU hosts are among them) who have acknowledged that there are users that have issues with TE these days.

I enjoy the MPU community for being open and positive. And I appreciate that it is being hosted and paid for by the MPU podcasters. And I am grateful for that. That is all I tried to convey. :slight_smile:

Smile obviously has some management problems, probably centered around the “mid-level” range of managers. What exec would tolerate a company website that is so woefully out of date as this?

started moving away from TE to KM for expansion last week

additional benefit: for my work I sometimes use a Citrix connection, and InfoSec have disabled the paste command, so TE did not work. KM “paste by typing” does, so now all my snippets also work in Citrix :slight_smile:

Case solved, case closed!

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I’ve officially moved my snippets away from TE - although it was timely since I noticed an update was just pushed that supposedly addresses the original crashing issue. Most of my snippets went to Alfred and I had a couple of snippets with hot keys that I had to move to KM. I think the one thing I lose is some fill ins, but honestly I wasn’t using those snippets often enough to justify the expense of TE (I’m sure it’s possible in KM if I spent more time figuring it out). One less app running on my Mac is alright with me. Thanks everyone for the comments in here with alternative solutions. Little did I know the apps I already had were good enough to avoid another subscription.

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If you have Alfred, you can easily have dynamic inputs in snippets, see:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/triggers/snippet/snippet-triggers-with-dynamic-inputs/

I use these all the time. You can even chain multiple inputs, storing your values as variables along the way, to paste a longer message with multiple custom arguments.

I also use Superhuman for email, and that allows dynamic snippets on emails for iOS (including filling first/last names) - which is even better than TE because it runs without switching between apps. It makes emailing on iOS on par with desktop.

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$30/month? I had to google to find this out as there is no real info on their website. @anon85228692 have you tried this email app?

It’s $10 a month if you work in Education. For me, it’s worth it because it saves a lot of time. As an estimate, I get through my email in half the time compared to when I used Mail.

It’s Gmail only, which I’m not using anymore, so it’s a non-starter for me. :slightly_smiling_face:
Also, despite being willing to pay for quality apps, I have a hard time believing that an email client could be worth that much.

The education price (10/month) made sense to me as it replaces SaneBox and TE (which cost that combined).

If you’re not in education, I’d say the price is too much unless you live in email and would really save a lot of time. It’s pitched for CEOs and business people who can write off the cost as an expense, not average users.

They are an incredible company. For example, on my first day using it I reported that there was an issue with the Spanish iPad keyboard (a shortcut not working). The next day they sent an invite to TestFlight with the issue fixed and in the next version released on the App Store the fix was applied. I’ve never had customer service that good, especially from an email app developer.

They are strictly gmail only as it is all built around that service.

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Can you share how you did this?? Im thinking this is the way for me too.

  1. I deleted all the snippets I had not been using to eliminate unnecessary work.
  2. I exported the remaining snippets using the web interface at TextExpander.com
  3. I used a PHP script to migrate the TE snippets to Alfred snippet. For some reason I am not able to find the script again.
  4. I had to do some work in Alfred to get variables for time and date and stuff like that working in Alfred. So it was no fully automated process.

While looking for the script, I found this though (I was not aware about that before):

@dfay has built something that migrates snippets from TextExpander to Alfred using AppleScript.

What are the differences between using Alfred or KM for text expansion? Why would you choose one over the other?

Thanks everyone that posted to this thread.

This is the first I have heard anybody having this problem besides me. And I have been having it for weeks and weeks if not months. I got so aggravated that I started typing nasty notes into the bug reporting box/tool.

I am going to go cancel my subscription and start migrating to another tool. Thanks for your suggestions.

[update]

Done

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what the heck is up with your subscription? why does it keep going up like that?

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So now with version 6.8.5, everytime you launch a fill-in snippet, the damn main TextExpander window opens too. Maybe we should be hoping Smile sells TextExpander also.

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When reading this thread I can’t help but thinking “thanks to our great friends at Smile”.

OTOH, I used TE myself long ago, and back then it worked fine. Moved over to aText (mainly because of price) and never looked back. Advantage of aText and (I assume) Typinator over Alfred is that you can have snippets per application.

I guess they just haven’t managed yet. They are obviously on the way out.

Yes - you are correct: Typinator provides for that.

Stephen

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I’m pleased I found this thread. I have just cancelled by TE subscription and gone to aText which looks like it does the job fine.

As well as the problems with TE crashing, I have had issues with a snippet that contained an AppleScript to get current IP - sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. Probably related?

My problems started when I got my M1 MacBook but happen on both M1 and Intel iMac. Possibly there was a rewrite for Silicon which went wrong?