An idea for Textexpander

I love Textexpander[1]. It has saved me countless hours of repetitive typing. Every email signature, misspelled word, markdown syntax shortcut, and form email has been a blessing that I’ve never taken for granted.

I have an idea for a major new feature that would make the app even more intuitive.

The only kind of annoying thing about Textexpander is setting up snippets in the first place. First, you have to notice that you’re typing the same thing repetitiously over a period of time. Then, you have to remember to write it in Textexpander. Then, you have to fiddle with it until it’s perfect, because I almost never write exactly what I want in Textexpander the first time.[2]

If you use 1password, you notice that when you create a new account somewhere, the app will ask you if you want to save this new password. What if Textexpander watched your keystrokes, and then suggested snippets based on your typing?

Say it remembered a database of things you wrote that were less than 100 words (this is something you’d get to toggle), and every time you wrote pretty much exactly the same thing twice (or three times, or whatever. Another toggle), it would send an alert, asking if you’d like to turn this into a snippet. If you select yes, the whole thing is turned into a new snippet. Several steps are saved, and you end up using Textexpander more. Everyone wins. It would ignore writing longer than 100 words consecutively, so it wouldn’t even be remembering all that many things.

If this feature exists in Textexpander 4 (I haven’t upgraded yet), someone please tell me.

It’s a bylaw of the internet to preface every article about Textexpander with "I love Textexpander.  ↩

This could just be me.  ↩