Today there have been a few people asking us how to port their snippets from TextExpander to TypeIt4Me. For the benefit of any of you who may be flirting with the idea of switching, here’s a quick primer explaining how to go about opening your TextExpander snippets in TypeIt4Me.
- Open TextExpander and ctrl-click on a group of snippets.
- Select the Save a Copy of Group “[name]” option, saving the copy to your desktop.
- Go to TypeIt4Me and click File > Open (or type cmd-o) to bring up an Open dialog. Navigate to the file you just saved to your desktop, select it and click Open. A Save As dialog will come up. Select the desktop as the target location and click the Save button. This will create a new TypeIt4Me snippets set on your desktop with the same name as your exported TextExpander file but with the extension .typeit4me.
- Double click on the new file. An alert will pop up informing you that it will be automatically moved to Application Support/TypeIt4Me/Sets.
Click Ok. Your snippets will be imported into TypeIt4Me and the set will appear in the Sets on this Mac pane.
- Repeat the process for the rest of your TextExpander snippet groups until you’re done*.
*Please note that TextExpander Fill-in Field snippets work differently than their TypeIt4Me equivalent, Autocue placeholders. The import process will not automatically convert them; you will need to manually adapt any Fill-in Field snippets to use TypeIt4Me syntax or they won’t work when you type them. The TypeIt4Me user guide explains how to create autocue placeholder snippets.