TextExpander

Shared snippets are nice but the interface is suffering. It’s overpriced for what they are offering. The main sales guy wasn’t very kind and was super fidgety.

Or you could just use the built in text expansion thats built into mac for many years. What gives with this kind of nonsense.

I've been using this app daily for years. It's such a time-saver. Especially, if you have to deal with support tickets. Sharing snippets across the team is great.

You can find version 5.1.5 at https://cdn.textexpander.com/mac/TextExpander_5.1.5.zip https://smilesoftware.com/textexpander/support?_ga=2.106887685.741852422.1532572220-579130076.1507348544#SystemRequirements ( via https://textexpander.com/entry/where-can-i-download-a-previous-version-of-textexpander-for-mac/ first) Aside: quoting the comment below "Having read a lot of negative user feedback on Twitter about the subscription model, I am convinced, this step towards recurring payment makes perfect sense, because there is one big advantage for customers: constant improvement of the software. " Two years of TextExpander-as-service disproves this theory. I can't think of a single meaningful feature that they have added in the two years since switching to a subscription service. Scroll back through the comments here and you'll see that people had been complaining about weak upgrades back to TextExpander 4's release. Moving to a subscription does _not_ guarantee that the development process will improve. It's a nice theory, and I've seen places that did it well (1Password seems like a good example). But switching back to TextExpander 5 after 2 years with TE6 meant losing almost no features. I can still use the old iOS app and iCloud syncing, which seems to work fine.

Way overpriced when compared with the $20 TypeIt4Me app AND I am sick and tired of getting this message: "DO NOT CLICK "Install Update" There is a bug (SINCE YOU'RE AWARE OF THE BUG-STOMP IT OUT!) in the TextExpander updater in version 4.0.4. You must download TextExpander 4.1.1 from our website. Our humble apologies. - Smile TextExpander 4 is a paid upgrade and requires OS X 10.7 Lion…" Especially since I paid lots of money for the software! Oh, and did I mention your reference to "10.7 Lion" that has been superseded many years ago? Smile-my butt… You make us frowny-face victims. Please get this crapware fixed! Sincerely…

Used to like it. Trouble with pricing plan that got out of hand. It would be nice to find a way that brings it inline with most other software.

I am starting too think that Smile is abandoning those of us that revolted and wanted to stay with version 5. So, Smile, am I wrong????????

What's wrong with options Smile? You should have two tracks, the subscription model (which really is just suitable for moneymaking software like media editing or development packages) and yearly upgrades with a fee smaller than the purchase price.

Now, the only option is to turn to the competition.

The current (July 2 2016) version of TextExpander here and on MacUpdate desktop is 6.05. The actual current version is 6.07. Please fix your process to follow this package closer.

This is a great app! I have saved countless keystrokes using this app and I haven't even used it to its fullest!

The two stars isn't directed at the software but instead the new pricing plan! I'm sticking with version 5 until it now longer works.

Subscription model is not for me ever

I'm done. Crappy product. Rediculous pricing. Moving on.

I am a long-term user of TextExpander and just upgraded to the new subscription-based TextExpander 6. I am thrilled to see the TextExpander-magic on Windows, as I am forced to use Windows for work related tasks. I fully recommend this upgrade for any multi-platform-user (Mac, iOS, Windows). In other reviews I learned that snippets are stored on external servers without encryption. This is no big deal for me, as I do not save confidential information in snippets. Having read a lot of negative user feedback on Twitter about the subscription model, I am convinced, this step towards recurring payment makes perfect sense, because there is one big advantage for customers: constant improvement of the software. Developers usually support old versions (bug fixes) until a new release or big upgrade is ready for sale. Each new version has to include more than one new feature in order to be qualified as "upgrade" and in order to be accepted by customers. Therefore customers have to wait until all new features are developed and are ready for sale. Development time for single features differs and may lead to longer upgrade-cycles. The subscription-based pricing model is fine for me as I do prefer small improvements within months over many new features in yearly upgrades. According to my personal TextExpander statistics, I saved about 56 hours in one year (19,000 snippets - 1,370,000 chars). For me upgrading was a no-brainer.

TextExpander 6.0.4 is latest but I did not update to 6 as I do not like the new pricing model on subscription base. Sorry, smile, but you should have also listened to your non corporate customers

TextExpander is already down to $40/year instead of $60. If they're cutting the price this soon, they must be aware of the tremendous backlash - but they aren't giving up on the subscription model, which is what people are objecting to. There was a recent editorial on MacNN that "you should just get used to subscription software," but it seems to me that this is essentially the same mistake made by music and movie services: If you try to force people to use the purchasing model you like instead of the one the people want, people will find alternatives or just (not condoning this) steal it, rather than conforming to the model they don't like.

I was just about to plunk down some relatively major coin on Smile's PDFpen Pro. Their recent raging business model with TextExpander has me running in the other direction. How soon will they find an excuse to move PDFpen to subscription as well? What we have here is a burgeoning Adobe copycat. And workflow tools just don't carry the weight for that kind of arrogance. 'Bye.

I won't be signing up for the subscription-based model. Even before this news, this company seemed to be more about milking its client base than about the software. If TextExpander had been unique or particularly outstanding at its job, I might have been concerned about leaving. It isn't, so I'm not.

What TextExpander (v5) does, it does well. But these days so many companies/services want you to subscribe. And those subscriptions add up. So with every new one I need to reconsider which ones are really worth it. Considering for what and how often I've used TextExpander, in my case it's not worth a subscription. I've tried aText and it does pretty much all I need for a fraction of the cost. That being said... I understand why developers are seeking a more constant and reliable flow of revenue. But people are unhappy because advances in development have been smallish for quite some time, so that falls flat when it comes to reasons justifying the move to a subscription based model. And why is the cost of maintaining TextExpander suddenly so much higher than it used to be? Employed too many people who expect to be paid (rightly so)? Are they all working in marketing? Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry. I've decided that a subscription is not for me. But unless you communicate the reasons of this move in great detail (incl. the cost) and well in advance you can't expect people to pay for a product that has seen little development lately.

I'm a long-time (~4 years) user of TextExpander, and I've been unhappy with TextExpander even before the pricing change. I'm leaving this as a lowest-score review for many reasons. Even before the new price gouging, they'd still only have gotten 1 or 2 stars from me.

Here are just some of the reasons TextExpander is awful:
- They charge high upgrade fees for barely any new features.
- The most exciting new feature was support for Javascript in their snippets.
- But TextExpander's expansion of Javascript-based snippets is ridiculously slow (about 5-10 seconds on a non-SSD, about 2-5 seconds on an SSD), which I guess is because it reads/writes some temporary files to disk and then reads the script output from that temp file. Or maybe it's because of how it launches Apple's "osascript" program. Either way, it's sloooow at doing advanced scripting.
- And it only supports AppleScript and Javascript, so forget doing something super advanced (i.e. downloading a webpage, scraping some content and outputting the result).
- And including snippets inside of each other is horribly poor. When I needed several advanced snippets to share advanced code, I ended up with a very ugly, hacked-together system of cross-references that simply looked horrible and slowed TextExpander's expansion to a crawl.
- Furthermore, another annoyance during regular text expansion is that whenever you use their "cursor placement" operation, the text cursor *crawls* to that location one step at a time. It's been annoying me but I assumed there was no other way.

When I found an email in my inbox talking about TextExpander 6 and "subscription model at $5 per month", I nearly puked in my mouth. I wasn't surprised, though. It's *exactly* what I expected from a company adding 1-2 features and gouging users for $20 each year for "upgrades" that frankly are mini-features at best. And now the only new feature in "v6" is that they removed the Dropbox/iCloud syncing features and added their own subscription-based syncing cloud. Allow me to reciprocate the giant "FU" back to TextExpander, since they just spat in the faces of all users.

To thank them for their disgusting behavior, I will now compare them to their two primary competitors and show how TextExpander falls behind both of them. I'd never tried the competitors before, but I am incredibly glad I did. It gave me everything I was lacking in TextExpander and more.

First out was aText.
- Only $5. Woah!
- It supports scripting in ANY shell-language (you just choose "Shell script" as snippet type, and type something like "#!/usr/bin/env php" at the top line to make a PHP script, for example). This feature allows you to do what I described earlier; i.e. you could write a script that downloads a webpage, finds some text on it, and uses that text as part of the expansion.
- Script execution is faster than TextExpander, but still slightly slow (~1 second), because aText takes the script-text and generates a script-file on the fly and executes it. It'd be faster if it stored them statically on disk. But if you don't need the shell scripting features, or use it rarely, you won't care about this minor slowdown. And like I said, it's still much faster than TextExpander's scripting, and supports any language.
- Telling a snippet to place the text cursor in a specific location is as slow as TextExpander; it moves one character at a time, which means it takes a fraction of a second after expansion before the cursor is in the right location. But if your snippets never tell the cursor to move (most people don't), this is not an issue for you.
- It supports EVERY TextExpander feature (including things like fill-in forms with dropdown/text input, and Dropbox syncing).
- For $5 (the cost of a single month of TextExpander's bullsh.t), you get all the same features and a permanent aText license. This is a FANTASTIC replacement for TextExpander for anyone not requiring *fast* shell scripting. I estimate that most regular users will only need aText and will be very, very happy with it. The interface is beautiful, by the way.

Lastly, the winner of the pack. Typinator.
- About $22 with the current 25% discount for TextExpander crossgraders, and that includes a free upgrade to Version 7 in the future.
- Full Dropbox (and others) syncing of your snippets and shell scripts, simply by moving the "Sets" folder location to a cloud-synced location like your Dropbox folder. Any changes to the files are instantly detected by all Typinator apps on all computers, even when it's running at the time. This is a far cry above the unreliable sync that TextExpander had.
- Shell scripts are literally shell scripts. They're stored in a special "Scripts" folder, end in ".sh", and are marked executable. This means you can use your full, syntax-highlighting text editors to write long, advanced scripts that have full access to the web, your filesystem, etc, so that they can do very advanced things.
- Shell scripts execute *instantly*. This is thanks to Typinator just needing to execute the script and capture the output (unlike TextExpander which runs osascript and uses temp files, and aType which must write the script to a file before executing it). I made a PHP shell script that outputs the current date, and Typinator expanded it in about 100ms every time, even on a non-SSD. My jaw dropped. This finally gives me access to super fast scripting in my snippets, allowing me to do things like a web scraper that pulls down prices and outputs the latest up-to-date price.
- You are able to use regular expressions as your snippet type, which means that you could use something like "(ee|rr|nn)name" as your "abbreviation" and a single snippet will react to eename, rrname and nnname, and your snippet itself can be script-based and use the "ee", "rr" or "nn" portions to determine what to output based on how you typed that abbreviation. This is great for snippets where you want tiny variations in output. It's also great for things like currency formatting (make a snippet that reacts to a sequence of numbers followed by some special characters, and make it grab those numbers and format them and output them).
- Shell scripts can receive arguments, i.e. "{Scripts/Test.sh what}" to send "what" to the script. That makes it easy to re-use the same script across multiple snippets and give it an argument that tells the script to slightly adjust the output based on what snippet is executing it. Heck, you can even execute the same script with different arguments via a single snippet by using Typinator's regular-expression text snippets, to capture custom input every time, like "{Scripts/Test.sh $1}" to send it the 1st captured regular expression argument (that you typed) from a regex-based abbreviation.
- Typinator includes built-in functions like regex replacements inside of your snippets which lets you do many advanced things without ever needing to create a shell script at all. For instance, I made a Regular Expression snippet with "([0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?)xx" as the pattern, and set it to Plain Text and wrote the following as the text replacement just to test it: "Please pay me \${/Regex /[0-9]/1//$1/}!". The result is that if I type "293.22xx", it expands to "Please pay me $111.11!". That was just a test of the built-in regex replacement function, which in this case replaces all digits with the number "1". There are many built-in functions and I am very impressed.
- Fill-in forms, dropdown menus, variables etc are fully supported and work better than TextExpander ever did. The popup window is faster, clearer and only asks for the field values (instead of showing all the distracting boilerplate text too).
- The "place text cursor at location" feature is instant. It just jumps directly from expansion to placing the cursor at the correct location. It's a godsend since I use lots of snippets with text cursor placement and it's wonderful to be able to keep typing instantly after expansion, instead of waiting for the cursor to move (like with TextExpander and aType).
- The Typinator language is very easy; all functions are within {} brackets, and you learn them quickly. For instance, {"xxdate"} would include the contents of the "xxdate" snippet, etc. It's therefore super easy to include snippets in each other, etc. Even script-based and input-form based snippet inclusions work perfectly.
- The company has an unbeatable track record of excellent OS support and stability year after year for all of their applications, and friendly customer support.

So... to sum it up:
- Buy aText if you don't need shell scripting and don't care about moving the text cursor fast (most people don't use "move text cursor" features in their text snippets at all so they won't notice or need this). It's just $5 and supports everything that TextExpander supports.
- If you need extremely fast shell scripting, cursor movement, powerful built-in functions (like regex text replacement), and *mindblowing regex pattern matching as your abbreviation triggers*, buy Typinator.
- Never again give a single cent to TextExpander. They've shown their greed and they're not even the best on the market. Typinator is light years ahead in power and speed.