Just to keep everyone updated - I did some digging and saw that Smile was offering legacy users a lifetime discount. I reached out to them and they provided me with a lifetime 50% off. That came out to $20.04 for the year. I can deal with that.
So, my next “challenge” was to get my snippets into their servers. Easy enough, right? Wrong.
They sent me instructions to do that, looked simple enough - just compress/zip then upload the file “settings.textexpandersettings” on my computer to their website. Unfortunately, I don’t have that file anywhere although I do have “settings.textexpander” on my computer. I tried to compress then upload that file but no dice. Didn’t work. Waiting for Customer Support to respond.
I have this setup for my email signature. From memory (I did all of this a few years ago) I think that I had to setup the signature the way I wanted in a text editor (e.g. BB Edit). I then coped this text into the built in text replacement on the Mac and assigned the keyboard shortcut. This the synced across to all devices (including iOS) with the correct carriage returns.
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Well, I’ll be… thank you so very much indeed! Works like a charm!
Yes, it is not that Keyboard Maestro has limits, it is that it is a more general solution. Everything in Keyboard Maestro is triggers and actions. So it takes more information to define what the trigger is, that it does in an application where the trigger is always just a simple string. Similarly, the actions can be anything, so it takes more information to define that than if the result is just a simple replacement string.
This additional information comes as two “costs” - one is in disk space, and one is in user interface. It takes more disk space to store more information, and it takes more effort to specify more information.
If you have a few hundred snippets, it makes little difference. The disk and time and effort are relatively minor.
If you have tens of thousands of snippets, then Keyboard Maestro is probably not the right tool for this task.
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But it will always be the right tool for me for macros!
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Thanks for the technical explanation. It is also good to have a ball park figure for how many snippets Keyboard Maestro can comfortably deal with. “A few hundred” which, frankly would cover the needs of nearly anybody I know, certainly my own. I will quote you on that one. It is surprising how often this comes up, especially on fora and so on.
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The best use of TE for iOS is to begin all of your text in Drafts. It has native TE support (full support of fill-in snippets) so no need to use their buggy keyboard. Other native TE iOS apps (with FULL support) are omnifocus, fantastical, and byword.
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