One tool that I have yet to fully embrace in my day to day work is a text expander. Back in my days as a .NET developer, AutoHotKey was my preferred choice of text expander but since moving to the Mac, I haven't invested too much time in searching for a text expander tool. Now though I'm starting to find that it would be of benefit to me if I was able to automate a few keystrokes here and there.

My email is the first place I would start. For a while now I've been unproductive when it comes to emails. Sometimes I find myself sending the same email a few times a week to different clients. Rather than searching for the previous email and copying and pasting the body I would like to store the body of the email in a text expander and just have it show in the email when I type in the snippet code. Another place I would like to automate things is legal documents for clients. I could store the template of a contract in a snippet.

There lots of other places as well I could be using a text expander like inserting the header of my blog posts, code snippets for my programming and of course the humble email signature. I know that all these examples could be solved by other means but each case requires a different way of setting it up and retrieving it. Having shortcut keys on hand to do this would be so much easier to implement and remember. Also, all my snippets would be in one place.

I started today with a trial of TextExpander for my MacBook. The reason I picked this is that it's name keeps coming up when I'm browsing the preferences of the apps I'm using. I'm going to be using it over the next few weeks. We'll see how I get on.