I have an unbelievable amount of subscriptions, and I honestly don’t mind many of them. However, the monthly/Yearly cost is becoming too much.
Just as a sample of my subs;
TickTick
Bear
Drafts
Keep it
Office 365
A lot of my subs crossover, i.e. one does the same as the other, That’s another subject.
An “easy” substitution for a subscription is for text expansion.
I have a Typinator licence through a bundle deal. So far, in trying to use it instead of TextExpander, I really have found little difference.
Has anyone else made the switch from TE to any other text expansion software? I would love to know your thoughts.
My needs are pretty simple, tried.a few dedicated text expansion apps but now keep the simple ones in Launchbar, one that require variables or calculation KBMaestro does the job just fine
TE works on compatible apps on iOS (crucially my writing apps, Bear, Ulysses, even OmniFocus) - that for me is worth entirely the price of the subscription.
Yip! That is a fantastic feature and was the very thing that brought me to TextExpander to begin with. I do use it often, especially in Drafts 5. I’m just not sure I presonally use it enough.
Having said that, I wouldn’t want to give that feature up!!!
Same as @TheOldDesigner I now use Keyboard Maestro and Alfred, which I changed to recently from Launchbar. It serves the same function regarding expansions. I have found no differences in performance with my 50 or so expansions than when I had them in TextExpander. I am not sure if I ever had them all in that anyway. I think email was always in Launchbar for example and muscle memory kept it there, it never had a snippet as such in other words.
I used TextExpander a few years ago and found it very slow. I switched to Typinator and couldn’t be happier. So much faster. Obviously, you give up iOS compatibility but I don’t do much real work on iOS (yet). Will cross that bridge if I ever splurge on the iPad Pro.
There are a couple of things to bear in mind if you use Keyboard Maestro. The developer himself, Peter Lewis, says that it is not designed to deal with large numbers of text expansions and will take up resources if you have large numbers. It is not clear what ‘large’ means here though. In my case I have over 50 and notice no resource penalty. I will also say you have to use an extra action when you create an expansion macro to delete if from the system clipboard. Otherwise all your clipboard history will just be text expansions. I found that made it unusable however it is an easy action to add. You have to know about it though: Keyboard Maestro tends to be a bit of a curve in that way. Alfred expansions seem to clear themselves from history and from Alfred’s own clipboard history. Not curiously from Keyboard Maestro’s history though. I use Alfred’s history now but would like to know how to clear expansions made in Alfred from Keyboard Maestro history. Complicated? It sure is! I am not sure how any of it works under the hood either which doesn’t help.
I also switched to Typinator and didn’t look back. The main reason was the subscription as well as some minor things that bugged me, within TE.
With regards to iOS integration, I somehow didn’t like the TE keyboard anyway: it just didn’t stick with me.
I worked around it through maintaining selected text expansions via the internal text expansion given through macOS (found under System preferences > Keyboard > Text). Yes, it adds a step when updating a snippet due to updating it in two places but I found it worthwhile and beneficial.
Also (and I don’t know how insane this is): it really helped me to come up with a system for text expansion which I then visualised in a mind map. This mind map acts as a master file for all text expansions and gives me a birds eye view of everything (occasionally it’s a cheat sheet, too).
I totally agree with you regarding the TE iOS keyboard. So much so I contacted Smile to ask their plans with development around the iOS keyboard. They came back with a very canned answer “if you’re having any issues we‘re here to help” and to be fair to them, I’m not sure what it is I don’t like about it. However, I hate it!
Another thing in TE favour is the fact some apps integrated it without the keyboard (Drafts 5, Fantastical) but again they are few.
I have Typeit4me (again the licence was part of a bundle) but I’ve decided to stick with Typinator and I’ll give Typeit4me a go on iOS.
I’m not against subscriptions but I have so, so many I need to cut down. I don’t feel I get value for money with the TE sub.
