I agree. my “snippets”/“macros” needs are quite lite. Primarily I need to be able to add some HTML syntax into a Markdown document. For example: the Markdown editor I use on both my Mac Mini and my three iOS devices is One Markdown. It does not support some Markdown syntax but does support the HTML equivalents. Other apps I use are primarily text editors but do provide some Markdown processing (BBEdit and Textastic). So if I want to highlight a block of text none of these apps support ==selected text== but they all support <mark>selected text</mark>. Initially I did this with macOS and iOS Keyboard Shortcuts. But recently I have been experimenting with Apple Shortcuts. These allow a much easier workflow as they can be listed in the Control Center.
This is what the Shortcut look like:
So my workflow is:
Select the text to be highlighted
Swipe down or click on the clock (depending on whether it’s iOS or macOS)
Touch or click the Highlight (or other) Shortcut
Paste the <mark>selected text</mark> into the document
Its simple and its free.
I use Shortcuts for more complex tasks as well (but that’s another story.
Another option is ClipTools from ClipTools: Clipboard Manager and More From MacMost it includes a Clip Manager and a feature called Smart Clips. It’s even easier to use than my Shortcuts but only works on my Mac.
I switched to Typinator and I think it works better than TextExpander did. Less buggy in my experience. I tried Alfred snippets first since I already use (and love) Alfred but it didn’t offer enough control for me.
I imported a few of my snippet groups using the above method and put a checkmark next to ones to test. I’m getting there… but a few snags:
Both TextExpander and Alfred Snippets are occasionally giving me one of these messages at times which prevents text expansion from working on my mac (I’m sure it’s some setting somewhere on my mac that is doing this - I’m on Sequoia 15.2 on Intel mac mini):
For the Safari message, when I quit Safari and wait about 10 seconds, then the message goes away (odd that it only happens sometimes with Safari being open but mostly not an issue).
When I get the ‘process ID’ message, I never see it listed in Activity Monitor - so I don’t know what is causing it.
I can’t figure out how to get the dates to auto-populate properly using Alfred Snippets the same way as TextExpander. The snippets are setup exactly the same way in each program, but for Alfred it does not input the dates for me:
So in the above example when I use the Alfred snippet, my file name looks like this:
%Y-%m - ally bank.PDF instead of 2025-01 - ally bank.PDF
Must be a setting I’m missing somewhere in Alfred.
So for this one, I have to use Dynamic Placeholders in Alfred which differs from TextExpander:
Instead of this: %Y-%m - ally bank
It needs to be this: {date:yyyy-MM} - ally bank
Since most of my snippets are date-based (either ‘year-month’ or ‘year-month-day’), I’ll have to manually change each snippet one way or another (sigh). A bit more work than I was hoping for.
