Cross-platform text expansion

[jakemason]

The gist of a text expansion application is a process that runs in the background and automatically manipulates text input when a certain set of keystrokes is detected. For example, if I type a specific phrase such as ;;phone it gets expanded to (555) 555-5555.

This can be really useful when there are tidbits of information that people ask for occasionally and you want a fast way to share that information with them. As in the example above, I occasionally get asked what my office phone line is, and I never remember it, so I have that exact entry in Dash/aText to insert it for me.

Sometimes there are license keys I need to add to software as I install them on newly created website backends and it's much easier for me to type ~~acf to get sdkfuJiaoEQdfhasdfMN980$q38#4uq09u4nfuigdygh893 than to log into the account and copy/paste it.

I've always wanted a cross-platform solution for this sort of text expansion. There's Dash on MacOS, and aText on Windows but both are bigger than I think they need (supporting offline docs and other things I don't need) and they're OS-specific so I can't share my configuration between the two easily.

An ideal alternative would have a simple config file that I could ideally copy between machines and take all registered macros and such with it. I might try to tackle this one myself, but I'm not sure I'll have the time next week so I'm throwing it out there for anyone else to potentially do!

[kernel-dev]

they're OS-specific so I can't share my configuration between the two easily.

That is the drawback of having such vastly different operating systems - their internals are exponentially different, in almost every aspect. Sure, in concept, they may resemble some similarities, but the way the user (or application) is to interact with the system differ majorly.