The Abbreviation Prefixes TextExpander Experts Use

A common point of debate among TextExpander users is how to name Snippet abbreviations—the text you type to expand the Snippet. When creating abbreviations, you want to make them:

Short and easy to type

Memorable

Difficult to expand accidentally

For example, if you have a Snippet to respond to an angry customer email, angry would be a poor choice of abbreviation since it would expand every time you type the word “angry.”

It’s helpful to standardize on a prefix or set of prefixes for your Snippet abbreviations so that they can remain short and memorable but also hard to trigger accidentally. For example, instead of the abbreviation angry, you could use any of the following abbreviations with a prefix:

/angry

;angry

.angry

,,angry

xangry

cs.angry (cs is short for “customer service”)

The question is: which prefix to settle on? At our Work Smarter Virtual Summit, one TextExpander user asked this of our TextExpander expert panel, which featured:

Brett Terpstra of Oracle, who is also a popular blogger, developer, and podcaster in the Apple community

Lawyer Laura McClellan of The Productive Woman podcast

Martin Ngo, a recruiter formerly with Meta

Ty Schalamon, a sales representative and former customer support manager for SketchUp

Here’s a video of the discussion:

' + '