We’re so thrilled to release TextExpander for macOS 6.5 and TextExpander for Windows 2.0, both of which make the power of TextExpander far more visible.
New Snippet Editor with Visual Macros
There’s a new snippet editor, which shows macros visually, rather than as blobs of text. Think WYSIWYG vs raw HTML.
What’s a macro? Good question. In addition to text and images, TextExpander supports expanding a variety of other items, including:
- Today’s Date
- Times
- Future or past dates and times using date math
- Fill-in-the-blank areas
- Keypresses
- Cursor positioning
- Clipboard
- Other snippets (you can “nest” one snippet inside another, like Russian nesting dolls)
Until now, when you selected one of these items in the editor, the snippet editor would insert text in a macro language, beginning with %.
For example, adding one day and displaying month, day and year looked like this:
%@+1D%B %e, %Y
Now, it looks like this:
This should make using macros much easier.
Here’s the old style for a popup to pick the day of the week:
See you on %fillpopup:name=Day:Monday:Tuesday:default=Wednesday:Thursday:Friday:Saturday:Sunday%
Here’s the new style:
Double-click the macro, and you’ll get the macro editor:
We’ve also improved the snippet preview. Just hold the command key (⌘) and press the Return key to see what your snippet looks like when its macros are expanded. This is super handy for nested snippets.
For the nerdier among us, we’ve added syntax highlighting for JavaScript snippets to make it easier to visualize your code.
Under the hood, we’ve done a ton of work, which included updating the snippet storage format and re-writing the expansion engine such that it will perform identically across platforms. If you’re interested, check out our detailed release notes.
If you haven’t had a chance, check out this version, it’s easier to use (and see) than ever.
