I recently upgraded my Intel Mac Mini to Sequoia and so far everything is great (just had a bit of trouble with Drobo and now TextExpander). I’ve been using TextExpander since the beginning (decades?), and it’s starting to give me trouble (I have to reboot to get it working again at times). I have a license for Alfred Powerpack which I believe has text expansion (never tried it yet). Wanted to find out what people have migrated to (including Alfred) and how you migrated your TextExpander snippets. Doing a bit of light googling I came across this particular utility: GitHub - danieldiekmeier/textexpander-to-alfred3: Convert your TextExpander snippets to Alfred 3 snippets.
Curious what paths folks have gone with … looking for the most painless/easy way to replicate TextExpander Thanks.
I switched to Typinator in the past month, based on recommendations in this forum. My TextExpander subscription renews in August, so I intend to make Typinator my text expansion app by then, so I can cancel TextExpander. I did import many snippets from TextExpander, and everything seems to run basically the same.
The only difference I have noticed between the apps, and I may be misinterpreting Typinator, but if you have snippet groups you only want to use in particular apps, the approach is a bit different. In TextExpander, you can set a snippet group to work (or not work) with certain apps, whereas in Typinator it’s the reverse—an app can be limited to specific snippet groups. As I used TextExpander for a decade, and would see specific snippet groups to only work with certain apps, I’m still figuring out the implications of this.
But as far as basic text expansion goes, Typinator seems quite good, and essentially seems to “replicate TextExpander.”
Ah - thanks so much! Sorry I missed your thread on this topic. That was quite the read
Since I already have a full license for Alfred, and my needs are very simple (I really only use TE on Mac … and for iOS I just use the built-in Apple snippets for just a handful of things I use it for on that platform), it seems that just sticking with Alfred is probably my answer. And thanks for the link to that utility - much appreciated.
I’ll give this all a go this week and see how it works out for me.
I do want to look at Keyboard Maestro again - I almost started using it quite a few years back when David talked about it but I never quite got there yet (I actually forgot about it). Nice to know this is another good option for just some simple TE on the Mac.
I haven’t used TextExpander, and don’t have the biggest need for this. But I use Raycast and am pleased. (Here’s documentation for import.)
I like that I can add {Dynamic Placeholders}, including where to place the cursor after the snippet has been expanded/written. You can either search for the snippets, or create keywords. I use it for things like code snippets and emoji (,y = ,n = etc.).
I don’t think you can set hotkeys for them, though – which is a bit weird, as you can set a hotkey for “everything” in Raycast. (There are extensions for that, though, of course.)
I still use Keyboard Maestro for its macro capability and its Conflict Palette feature, but I’ve switched to using Alfred for its Snippets feature (aka text expansion). Love the Alfred user interface.
I mainly use the Apple built-in text replacements, and I also have some more complex ones saved in Keyboard Maestro. This means most of my expansions work in all my iOS apps without the need for a keyboard, so I see it as an upgrade.
I would add here that having it work cross platform is wonderful if you pick up an iPad in the future, or a Vision device in a decade etc (assuming they’re similarly locked down).
Because I’m procrastinating, I just converted my TextExpander snippets into Alfred Snippets. I should have done this ages ago.
I used TE’s free trial to export the snippets I’d created in the non-subscription version to a CSV file. Then I used the Convert to Snippet Collection workflow to load them into Alfred.
Good to know … I haven’t tried the GitHub utility yet mentioned earlier, but your way sounds even better. Maybe I’ll try it this way first to do the conversion (my TE version is 5.1.5).
I converted my 20 groups of snippets (much more than I thought) into the latest TE8 version, and then extracted each of those groups to a csv file (20 files). If you don’t mind, would you be able to give me more details on how to do this last part in Alfred? I’m not very technical and certainly don’t use all of Alfred’s capabilities and just can’t figure out this last part (I’ve never used its Workflows for example). For example, I created one of my snippet groups ‘Banking’ in Alfred and just can’t for the life of me figure out how to import my TE ‘Banking’ csv file into that Alfred snippet group (if the ‘Snippet Tranformer’ Workflow needs to be used?):
Thanks.
,n = 
etc.).
(There are extensions for that, though, of course.)
