What is TypeIt4Me?

TypeIt4Me is a text expander, like Apple’s text replacements on steroids. Text expansion is essentially on-the-fly substitution of short typed abbreviations with longer ‘snippets’ of content that they represent. This can include lengthy words, phrases, boilerplate texts or even pictures. Whenever you type a pre-defined shorthand abbreviation of your choosing, TypeIt4Me instantly replaces it with its corresponding snippet.

The very first text expander released for the Mac platform – actively maintained and developed for over 30 years – TypeIt4Me is designed to make typing quick, easy and painless for you. Once launched, it runs unobtrusively in the background to help you breeze through your email correspondence and swiftly compose your reports, essays, novels, medical notes or legal texts.

Find yourself typing the same things over and over? Build up a set of abbreviations and the full text or image ‘snippets’ that they represent. TypeIt4Me will save you time and keystrokes by automatically expanding them as you continue typing. This works system-wide, almost anywhere you can type on your Mac.

How does a text expander work?

A text expander runs quietly in the background, “watching” what you type. When it notices you’ve typed a string of characters that matches an abbreviation you’ve defined, it springs into action. It will instantly backspace over the typed characters and replace them with the corresponding snippet of text or image content you told the app they represent.

Here’s how a text expander typically works:

• Abbreviation Creation:
  • You create a list of abbreviations, snippets, or short codes that you commonly use.
  • Each abbreviation is associated with a longer piece of text or predefined content.
• Activation Trigger:
  • When you type an abbreviation followed by a specific trigger (such as pressing the spacebar), the text expander recognizes the trigger and replaces the abbreviation with the corresponding expanded text.
• Expansion of Text:
  • The text expander replaces the typed abbreviation with the full, expanded text in real-time.
• Variables and Dynamic Text:
  • Some advanced text expanders (like ours) allow you to include variables or dynamic text in their snippets. For example, the date, time, or clipboard contents might be inserted dynamically.
• Customization:
  • You can customize the behavior of the text expander, such as defining specific abbreviations, managing the snippet library, and adjusting settings for different applications.

Benefits of Text Expanders:

• Time Savings: they can save you time by reducing repetitive typing.
• Consistency: they can ensure frequently used phrases or responses are consistent.
• Reduced Typos: they can reduce the chances of making typos in commonly used text.
• Increased Productivity: they enable overall typing efficiency.

“How might I use TypeIt4Me?”

Let’s say you often type your email address. Instead of typing it out each time, you could set up an abbreviation like “mymail” to automatically expand into your full email address when you type it and hit the activation trigger.

By defining a set of mnemonic abbreviations for most frequently used words, you can type speedily yet more accurately and with less effort. TypeIt4Me will save you keystrokes and potentially alleviate repetitive strain injury.

For example, u r rh ab th cgs could swiftly produce you are right about the changes (if you have

defined u=you, r=are, rh=right, ab=about, th=the and cgs=changes).

How you use TypeIt4Me will depend on who you are and what you often find yourself writing.

Common use cases:

Text expanders are particularly useful for professionals who frequently communicate via email, write code, or engage in any activity that involves repetitive typing. They can significantly streamline workflows and enhance productivity.

TypeIt4Me is popular with doctors, lawyers, customer support teams, programmers, journalists, authors and bloggers, to give just a few examples. Things it can help you knock out more quickly include:

• People’s names, email addresses and other contact details
• Commonly repeated phrases
• Awkwardly lengthy / difficult-to-spell medical terms
• Boilerplate clauses for legal contracts
• “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” IT support replies

It can be particularly useful for entering repetitive data in a database file or spreadsheet, or for anyone who frequently types the same things over and over.

Many people find TypeIt4Me useful for speedily inserting the current date and a return address when composing letters. It’s handy for email sign-offs, too. For example, you might type just br to get:

Best regards,

John Appleseed.

A couple of our favourite time savers:

As developers, we use TypeIt4me ourselves to type standard phrases when providing email support for our software. It’s great for programming, too. Pro tip: abbreviations don’t have to be shorter than the text they produce. They can sometimes just be an easier way to produce single characters that are awkward to type.

TypeIt4Me can save you having to switch keyboards to type in other languages and use special characters, accents or symbols. For instance, a US keyboard may not have a readily accessible Euro symbol, so eur could ‘expand’ to €. When typing in French, ag could become à (a with an accent grave). You may find this much easier than typing alt-` + a, or switching between international keyboards or long-pressing to pick from an accented character pop-up.