Typing Automation With Typinator

Posted on: 12 Feb 2011

Categories: Typinator, Automation, Snow Leopard, and OS X

I’d like to share another tip that could save you some time and hassle and which is fun too.

In my last post I detailed how to insert the current timestamp in Numbers. In that same post I said it would be nice to define a keyboard shortcut to execute the insert date & time action in Numbers. Right after writing the article I decided to take my own advice and create a shortcut. That is when I discovered there is an issue with keyboard shortcuts at least in Numbers on Snow Leopard: they weren’t being remembered across logins, only during the current session with Numbers. You could see it still defined next to the menu item, but the shortcut would not execute subsequent to another login and it turned out via Google that others were having the problem as well. So, I thought, wouldn’t it be at least as nice if I could type an abbreviation that would insert a timestamp.

Then I started to imagine all the ways I could use typing automation. I was already convinced typing automation is a good idea as I was already using yas/snippet, macros, and custom functions in Emacs, and Vim.

My search yielded several competing products:

• TextExpander
• Presto
• TypeIt4Me
• Presto
• Typinator

My criteria was simple:

• It must work on Snow Leopard
• It must work with Carbon Emacs (which is not friendly to most paste programs unless you use a special mode which I don’t like to use)
• It must allow scoping to application
• It must not be a resource hog either in CPU cycles or in memory usage
• It must be snappy
• It must have an efficient interface for defining and organizing snippets
• It must run headless but make the UI available quickly if the need arises to interact with it

I downloaded the demos and started using them, keeping an eye toward the requirements above. To test the memory and CPU usage I just ran Activity Monitor and filtered by the app name.

Rather than give an exhaustive discussion considering the strengthes or weaknesses of each, I am going to share with you why I chose Typinator and what my experience using it is now:

• Typinator runs headless.
• Typinator allows scoping per application (several others on this list do too).
• Typinator was the snappiest and most reliable at actually executing the expansions on my system.
• Typinator seems to actually do typing automation instead of paste automation, an important difference that makes it work better with Emacs than several of the others.
• Typinator was lean enough, and leaner than several of the others, on resource usage. Running headless is a big part of that since it only has to run one process to watch for abbreviation triggers.
• I prefer Typinator’s interface for efficiency and workflow reasons. Typinator’s UI makes it easy to define expansions and organize them quickly on one simple screen.

Now that we have discussed how my requirements were best met by Typinator, let’s talk briefly about how Typinator is turning out to be a tool that I am increasingly using and enjoying.

It would be hard to go back to using keyboard shortcuts to insert timestamps in Numbers now that I have an abbreviation expansion trigger to do that for me: ‘tts’. That brings me to another nice couple features of Typinator. I was just able to type ‘tts’ without it expanding because Typinator allows me to pause expansions by typing the shortcut Ctl-Shift-t and that same shortcut toggles it back on. Doing so even has a different sound for paused or active state. Nice touch.

I am starting to use Typinator expansions in other OS X apps, like Mail.app. ‘Please see responses interlaced below…’ is triggered by ‘rri’, for example.

Though I do use yas/snippet in Emacs for software development purposes, I am experimenting with creating some expansions in Typinator scoped to Emacs for a particular programming language and organized as such in a set. That is working fairly well, but naturally is not nearly as powerful as yas/snippet. The purpose of Typinator is to work across all OS X apps and save you time and work. If you like automation, you’ll likely enjoy Typinator.

I’ll not list all the cool features of Tyinator here, but there are many more. You can download and try a free demo of Typinator here.

Enjoy!