You’ll probably want to edit the single-snippet importer in a couple of places, because your snippet naming system is unlikely to match mine.įor many years, I used a semicolon to prefix all of my TextExpander abbreviations. With this setup finished, you’ll be ready to run either the single-snippet importer or the multi-snippet importer. The preference can, of course, be changed back after the importing is done. This is a much more robust way to do the application switching, so I’ve changed the macro accrodingly.
I normally have the “Hide TextExpander icon in Dock” option turned on but if I turn it off, TextExpander acts like a normal app, and I can use Keyboard Maestro’s Activate a Specific Application Action to switch to TextExpander instead of the simulated clicks I had been using. Because of that, the only way I could get the importing macro to switch between Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander was to simulate a click in the middle of the name of the TextExpander title bar, and that only works if the middle portion of the title bar is visible.Įd Cormany pointed out that the TextExpander title bar doesn’t have to be visible if I change one of its preferences. It doesn’t appear in the Dock or in the Tab Switcher.
#Typeit4me export mac#
You’ve no doubt noticed that the TextExpander application doesn’t behave like other Mac apps. One last thing: you’ll have to make sure the middle of the title bar of the TextExpander window is visible even when the Keyboard Maestro application is active. You might need to create a new dummy macro (which you can then delete) to get this set up. Make sure that the Actions panel is set so that the Insert Text by Typing Action is chosen from the Text Category. Open the Keyboard Maestro Editor and open or create a new folder for your imported snippets.The macro tabs back and forth to select different parts of the snippet, and it only works if it starts in the right place. Make sure the snippet itself is highlighted in blue on the left side of the window. Here, I’ve opened my folder of Keyboard symbol snippets and have selected the first in the list. Open TextExpander and select the snippet you want to import. To set yourself up to run the main macro, you’ll have to do a few things: The other is a simple looping macro that runs the first one a specified number of times to import several snippets. The main macro imports a single snippet from TextExpander into Keyboard Maestro. Two macros are in a library you can download. It’s limited to text-only snippets-although I suspect I’ll be able to use it as a template for macros that import AppleScript and shell script snippets-and needs a bit of setup before it can run. This is a brute force approach, one that I’m not especially proud of. So I took another approach: a Keyboard Maestro macro that copies the relevant information out of TextExpander and pastes it into Keyboard Maestro.
Figuring out how write its format was going to take way more time than a single-use script was worth. Because Keyboard Maestro is a more powerful tool, its plist format is a more deeply nested system of dicts and arrays. But while TextExpander’s plist format is very simple and easy to understand, Keyboard Maestro’s is distinctly more complex. My first thought was that I could use Python’s plistlib module to turn an exported TextExpander library into a Keyboard Maestro library for importing. Or going with Typinator or TypeIt4Me, both of which work more like TextExpander has up until this new version.Įnough unwanted advice. You might be better off sticking with TextExpander and paying the extra vig. I’m already a very comfortable Keyboard Maestro user, so making new snippets in it instead of TextExpander will be an easy transition for me. It’s just that the balance of pros and cons that kept me using TextExpander well after I could have switched to Keyboard Maestro has now tipped in Keyboard Maestro’s favor.īut just because it’s tipped for me doesn’t mean it’s tipped for you. And while Smile’s price increase and its switch to Snippets as a Service™ has unquestionably been the tipping point for my decision to finally make the change, it isn’t a decision I’ve made in a fit of anger. This post describes a macro I wrote that performs some of that migration.īefore I get into the macro itself, I want to point out that I’ve been thinking about moving from TextExpander to Keyboard Maestro for a couple of years-pretty much ever since I bought Keyboard Maestro. Next post Previous post Importing TextExpander snippets to Keyboard MaestroĪ few days ago, I wrote about how the new version of TextExpander doesn’t have any compelling features for me and that I’d probably start migrating my snippets from TextExpander to Keyboard Maestro.
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