TextExpander Best Practices: 5 Customer Success Secrets

With TextExpander, there are no rules. You have total freedom to create, organize, and name your Snippets however you want. However, we’ve built up a lot of “best practices” over the years—little tricks that make using TextExpander more enjoyable and efficient.

With TextExpander—or any productivity tool—customers often ask us if they’re using it “right.” How should Snippets be named? What abbreviations should you use? Should you use a prefix or a suffix for the abbreviation to prevent accidental expansion? The truth is, we often have the same questions ourselves.

Rex Mann, one of our Customer Success Managers here at TextExpander, is a walking encyclopedia of these best practices based on his years of experience in psychology and productivity consulting. Until now, his knowledge has only been available through our regular TextExpander webinars, but we decided that these tips need to be written down!

Also see the second part in this series, which covers creating and documenting Snippets.

TextExpander Definitions

TextExpander is a typing shortcut tool that helps you write faster. You can save any type of text into TextExpander: words, phrases, paragraphs, codes, URLs, emails, and even entire book chapters.

For each text fragment you save, which we call a Snippet, you assign it a keyboard shortcut or abbreviation. From then on, whenever you want to insert the saved text, all you have to do is type the abbreviation.

For instance, you can create a Snippet so when you type txp it expands into “TextExpander.”

See how TextExpander works

Type this shortcut below txp

TextExpander

Let’s define a few terms upfront. There are three key components of a Snippet:

Label: This is simply the name of the Snippet you see in TextExpander and in inline search.

Abbreviation: This is the string of characters you type to trigger Snippet expansion. In the example above, txp is the abbreviation.

Content: What the Snippet expands into. In the example above, the Content is “TextExpander”.

That’s a simple example. TextExpander can do so much more. You can create Snippets with fill-ins, optional sections, and other customization options. It can help you fill out long forms. To get a sense of everything you can do with TextExpander, check out our TextExpander 101 webinar.

Now that we’ve nailed down those basic definitions, let’s see Rex’s tips.

1. Keep related Snippets organized into groups

Organization is a cornerstone of TextExpander best practices. Many TextExpander users have built up collections of hundreds—or even thousands—of Snippets over the years, and without a good system in place, it’s all too easy to forget what Snippets you have. Organization makes your Snippets accessible, which also makes them maintainable.

Take advantage of Snippet Groups to organize related Snippets. It keeps your Snippets organized and offers other advantages:

It keeps your Snippets in shorter, easily scannable lists.

It helps you take advantage of Snippet Group abbreviation prefixes to make it easy to create abbreviation patterns for related Snippets.

It makes them easier to share since you share a Snippet Group instead of an individual Snippet.

Other than sharing, there are two important settings only available to Groups and not individual Snippets:

Expand In: This lets you specify which applications the Snippet will expand or not expand in. For instance, you may have a Snippet group of frequently visited URLs that you only want to expand in web browsers.

Expand When: By default, Snippets only expand when following whitespace. However, there can often be times when you want a Snippet to expand after a character, like a colon or period.

It’s a best practice to make copious use of Groups. When in doubt about where to store a Snippet, create a new Group for it! It’s perfectly okay to have a Snippet Group with only one Snippet. In time, you’ll likely come up with more Snippets that fit in that Group, so this saves you from having to find and aggregate them at a later date.

More Snippet Groups mean more options.

This video teaches you how to create Snippet Groups:

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