Love the web

This article is about a very nice little productivity application for the Mac that saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently used text strings and images accross all your Mac apps. This piece of software is called Textexpander made by www.smileonmymac.com. There is also a version for the PC called Texter.

Code / command line example

This becomes increasingly more helpful with something like Kiwibank updates. For example on the command line when each job has a separate svn branch and we are constantly switching from branch to branch, merging branches into the trunk and creating patches ready for live releases.

When a new job for kiwibank arrives we create a new branch from the trunk. This is the code that I need: (NOTE: this is example code only).

svn copy svn+ssh://[svn.example.com/folder/example-address]/trunk svn+ssh://[svn.example.com/folder/example-address/]branches /new_branch -m "created new branch"

Old process:

1. Open new browser window
2. Find Wiki page (bookmarked)
3. Find command
4. Copy command
5. Switch to command line
6. Paste command in

New process:

1. Open command line
2. Type nb (press tab key)

Which gives me:

svn copy svn+ssh://[svn.example.com/repos/example-address]/trunk svn+ssh://[svn.example.com/repos/example-address]/branches/

I then just complete the command with the branch number and comment.

Design example:

A nice little text snippet for designers is lip (press tab key). This gives a block of lorem Ipsum. Very efficient.

Dolor ut aliquip nisl commodo facilisis. Et eu elit ex dolor quinta. Esse vel assum in qui parum. Nunc est typi soluta dolor hendrerit. Ii quod qui nihil hendrerit habent.

This can also be handy for frequent urls. Want to get to the Springload quickly:

1. command + L to focus your cursor to the address bar in Firefox
2. s (press the tab key) - return

http://www.springload.co.nz

A nice little feature in Textexpander is it records the time and characters saved. After having this two days I've saved myself typing 10,040 characters - about 1 hour of time. Granted there was a bit of testing involved in there but you get the idea.