The Unheard Word

There are a lot of coding tools available these days that offer some form of snippets. The idea is to save sections of code that are re-used often, in an easily accessible format. Dreamweaver, for example, has a snippets panel. But it can still get tedious to locate the snippet you need, especially when it’s one you use a lot.

TextExpander is a nifty Mac OSX Preference Pane utility that, upon a trigger or pre-defined keystroke combination, inserts “snippets” of text anywhere in the OS. I have saved as “snippets” text strings such as my mail server (how tedious it can be to constantly add in mail.server.com a dozen times when setting up email addresses), my various signatures, my most-used email addresses, my web site addresses and my name in different formats. TextExpander can even use variables to insert, for example, the current date and time. It is hugely time-saving and I always get a buzz from seeing the desired text appear with just a couple of keystrokes. 🙂

Therefore, TextExpander fits in beautifully with web development, and no doubt any kind of programming work. Whether your development application of choice supports snippets or not, TextExpander is a great way to quickly re-use code without interrupting your workflow.

TextExpander is available as a 30-day demo, after which you will be reminded to purchase and register it. The purchase cost is US$29.95, so it would be worth trying out the demo to see if the productivity benefits are worth it to you, as they have been to me.

Technorati Tags: Dreamweaver, web development, Mac OSX, OSX, TextExpander, Preference Pane, Snippets

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Web Design, Computers, Technology & the WWW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.