As I’m switching from a German keyboard to a US keyboard but I still need to write in French and German text, so I set up TextExpander abbreviations, like these: /ae becomes ä /oe becomes ö /ue becomes ü /ah becomes á /aw becomes à /c becomes ç Same goes for uppercase. To avoid much thinking I set the French ones up to be close to the sound of their most common use. I set these up as I go, whenever I need one I create the new snippet first. That takes a few seconds each time but in the end saves me more than it costs me. It’s one of these practices that need dedication the first few times till you’re accustomed to doing it. I’m going to set up these abbreviations in my own TextExpander snippet library. I may not need them as frequently as Frank does, but it would be great not having to wade through the Special Characters palette when I do. Update: As Frank pointed out to me, this approach only works if you are using a delimiter character to trigger your expansions. Automatic expansions only happen at the beginning of a word. If I typed “Fahrvergnuegen” in order to get “Fahrvergnügen”, the “ue” would NOT turn into “ü” in the middle of the word when TextExpander is set to automatic expansion. Alles klar?
TextExpander: Smooth Transition Between Keyboard Layouts
