Home > Tech Explained

Text Expansion: The Quick Way to Give Your Productivity a Big Boost

By Alexander Fox
Text Expansion: The Quick Way to Give Your Productivity a Big Boost Featured Image

If your job involves a computer (and it probably does), you spend a lot of time typing. And if your job involves programming or medical charting, forget it. You can probably hear the clacking of keys in your sleep.

Phone numbers, canned responses, witty ripostes – a lot of the stuff you typed today is probably the same as the stuff you typed yesterday. If you get a text expansion application set up on your machine, you can assign all that repetition to short, unique key combinations that “expand” into the full text.

Like a lot of productivity enhancements, text expansion is all about shaving off a few seconds here and there and letting them add up. More significantly, you’re decreasing your cognitive load. The less time you can spend on menial tasks, the more brainpower you’ll have available for higher-level pursuits. Plus, this is the future, so why are we still typing our names?

You’ll discover the real power of text expansion when you use it to replace more complicated things. If you send the same emails over and over, you can save hours every week by replacing those emails with text expansion. Since it’s inline, you don’t need to switch apps to copy and paste some template.

Getting Started with TextExpander

To get started, we need a text expansion application. TextExpander is reliable, similar to other text expansion apps, and cross-platform, so it’s a good place to start. It packs some serious power and gives you a wide range of flexible tools to use as you wish.

text-expander-snippet

I type my name constantly, and I bet you do too. So, I set up a simple rule to replace a unique set of characters with the longer string. In this case I’ve used ;af as the abbreviation, which expands to Alexander Fox. Note that I’ve prefixed the abbreviation with a semicolon. It’s important to pick character strings that you would not normally type, or you’ll be triggering the rule when you don’t mean to. I start all my abbreviations with semicolons, but that’s a personal choice.

Advanced Usage

That’s pretty obvious, but there are other little optimizations you can make. You can use ;ddate to fill in today’s date, or type ;tmrw to get the date for tomorrow. Simplify file-naming conventions or create a variety of image-based email signatures to match your branding. Streamline your power-Googling and expand ;pdf to type:pdf but only when you’re in your browser.

text-expander-ddate

My favorite technique is turning boilerplate emails into forms. Set up an abbreviation like ;pitch and have it automatically expand to several paragraphs of text. Once you get the hang of it, you can create fields that allow you to fill in information like names, which vary from email to email. And if you understand AppleScript, you can use text expansion to trigger them.

text-expander-pitch

TextExpander isn’t limited by much, except your own creativity. The online tutorials are satisfyingly thorough, and that’s a great place to start getting your feet wet. You will need to create an account when you download the application, and subscription pricing starts at around $4/month.

Initially available for MacOS only, the developers have recently released a beta version for Windows. Given the developer’s reputation for reliability, you should see a full Windows version soon.

PhraseExpander

phrase-expander-smartcomplete

PhraseExpander is a little different from TextExpander. It’s a more advanced program, and it’s much more like scripting software than a dedicated text expander. There are a lot of features beyond text expansion to make your life easier, including creating templates based on common variables or producing full-fledged macros to automate complicated tasks.

Phrase Expander is currently only available for Windows for a one-time purchase of $59.

AutoKey

autokey-configure

For Linux, the old trusted AutoKey provides a lot of the same functionality as TextExpander, and it’s totally free.

Conclusion

If you spend as much time at your keyboard as the average cubicle jockey, text expansion will not only save you keystrokes, but time. It does take some practice to get into the habit, though. After you’ve set up your snippets, you’ll need to remember that you’ve set them up, and then remember to use them. It is worth the upfront investment, and once you get the whole thing working smoothly, you’ll appreciate never having to type “Let me know what you think!” again.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Alexander Fox Avatar
Alexander Fox
Alexander Fox is a tech and science writer based in Philadelphia, PA with one cat, three Macs and more USB cables than he could ever use.

Read next

In 1965, Joe Sutter’s Boeing team began shaping the 747 around a future they thought would belong to supersonic jets, lifting the cockpit onto a hump so the nose could open for cargo once the giant subsonic passenger plane had outlived its brief moment
Vintage keyboard with tactile buttons paired with a modern digital interface on screen.
Apple’s original 1984 Macintosh keyboard had no arrow keys, no function keys, and no numeric pad because Steve Jobs wanted users to reach for the mouse first. Then Apple quietly sold the missing keys as an accessory.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
Flat lay of travel essentials including a passport, map, smartphone, and pop camera.
Masahiro Hara and Denso engineers built the QR code in 1994 to help Toyota suppliers scan car parts from any angle, then kept the patent open until phone cameras and a 2020 pandemic turned the factory square into a daily ritual on restaurant tables
In 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes wrote LAP6 for the LINC computer from her parents’ Baltimore home, testing an interactive operating system on a 250-pound machine in the living room and becoming the first known person to use a personal computer at home, twelve years before the Apple II reached buyers
Hands manipulating wires on breadboards for electronic prototyping.
When Grace Hopper wanted to explain a nanosecond to admirals who kept asking why satellites were slow, she handed each of them a piece of wire 11.8 inches long, the exact distance light travels in a billionth of a second, and told them to keep it in their pocket as a reminder that physics, not laziness, sets the limit.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
An astronaut in a spacesuit ventures across a barren, Mars-like desert landscape.
When Doug Wheelock came home after 163 days in space, he said he had craved the aroma of leaves, grass, flowers, and trees, the rush of Earthiness that reaches astronauts only when the hatch opens back onto the living planet