A few interesting tips were published on Macworld.com today, in a piece titled “Creative text expanding“. Derik DeLong shared some ways he uses TextExpander to easily insert HTML tags using the clipboard. He also gives a few examples of using shell script snippets in the Terminal to execute Unix commands. I am certainly the least geeky person here at SmileOnMyMac HQ, so I was pleased to discover that even I could figure out how to use the Terminal and TextExpander to run a word count on text copied to the clipboard. Not hard at all. Don’t forget to change your snippet type to “Shell Script” when you’ve pasted the snippet into your TextExpander library.

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\alpha → α Greek letter alpha \infty → ∞ Infinity symbol \int → ∫ Integral symbol \sqrt → √ Square root symbol You can download the Latex math and Greek symbols group here: http://ilorentz.org/beenakker/Latexsymbols.textexpander Choose Add Group from File… from the + menu to import the new group. Thanks for sharing your group with us, Carlo!

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TextExpander 2.6 to specify on a per-group basis when abbreviations will expand. The choices are to expand after:

• Whitespace (the default / classic behavior)
• All characters except letters & numbers (punctuation, etc.)
• Any character

TextExpander user Miguel Brunell from Mexico helped develop an excellent use of the new “any character” option with snippets for Spanish accents. For example, one can type ~n for ñ or ‘i for í. If you type in Spanish, you may find this handy. For example, cigüeña is the word for “stork” in Spanish. Using TextExpander, you can type c-i-g-“-u-e-~-n-a and get: cigüeña! You can download Miguel’s snippets here: Spanish Accents Choose Add Group from File… from the + menu in TextExpander to add the downloaded snippet group. Divertanse!

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