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- #ALFRED 4 SNIPPETS CODE#
- #ALFRED 4 SNIPPETS PASSWORD#
- #ALFRED 4 SNIPPETS SERIES#
- #ALFRED 4 SNIPPETS WINDOWS#
* Viewer Hotkey: Here, you set the keyboard shortcut for Alfred to show all your text snippets in a long list. In this window, you can set a variety of settings before creating your first snippet. Navigate to Features in the left sidebar and click Snippets halfway down the menu. I do this by hitting ⌘ + Space (which I’ve hot-wired to replace the built-in Spotlight Search). They are a perfect example of one of those easy-to-automate tasks that can pay dividends instantly.įirst, you’ll have to open Alfred’s preferences. I use text snippets specifically for file naming conventions, but I also have a specific email I send to clients about 50 to 100 times a year saved as a text snippet as well. Text snippets are best used when you have tedious-to-type information over and over again, like your address, generic emails, or file naming conventions. When I type t1c, Alfred sees the text and instantly replaces the text with T1 Client Copy – 2021. For instance, I have a text snippet saved for renaming client tax return PDFs.
#ALFRED 4 SNIPPETS SERIES#
Really quickly before we get into the weeds, we need to answer the ultimate question: What is a text snippet?Ī text snippet is a series of letters or punctuation you type that trigger an app like Alfred to instantly replace the text with a longer set of saved text. Here’s how I set up and used Alfred 4’s text expansion features this past tax season to save myself oodles of time typing out the same file types over and over again.
#ALFRED 4 SNIPPETS PASSWORD#
Added workflows can control music playback, or insert a password from 1Password, or find a Bible verse instantly. A quick search can bring up any file or folder on your Mac. So off you go on the hunt for an app to either replace TextExpander or to jettison text expansion habits out the door entirely.įor a long while, I was able to go the jettison route - most of my text expansion needs were trivial and I could get by without the helpful workflows.īut new processes at the office this tax season instantly led me into Alfred 4’s text expansion features.Īlfred can do just about anything, it seems. But its feature set and price likely align it more for power users than for casual users like myself. TextExpander was one of those apps that made me feel like king of my Mac.
It was even cooler when you triggered a little dialog box that let you type in a custom bit of text to be added into the text expansion. There was a little bit of magic every time one of those snippets expanded. Way back when it was just someone's project on the AHK forums I contributed a couple of fixes to it, before it was so complex.I had my first taste of text snippet expansion way, way back when everyone could use TextExpander without the subscription cost.
#ALFRED 4 SNIPPETS CODE#
The code is pure spaghetti and filled with goto statements and global variables and trying to understand it is a lost cause, but despite that it's almost bug-free and covers all of the corner cases, including copying from zip files, Microsoft Office documents, images, files, etc.
#ALFRED 4 SNIPPETS WINDOWS#
While it is written in AutoHotkey and hasn't seen any updates in 8 years, it still works perfectly under Windows 11. And tapping Z strips the text formatting. It's so intuitive that it makes other clipboard managers feel clunky. Tapping X switches actions (Paste, Cancel, Delete, Delete All), and releasing Ctrl commits the action. Pressing Ctrl+V while holding Ctrl down brings up a tooltip with the current item on the clipboard, and you can move backwards and forwards through the stack by tapping C and V (while still holding Ctrl). The main functions are all accessible with the regular Ctrl and ZXC keys, in the normal flow. Ditto is good but I am partial to the user interface of an AutoHotkey program called ClipJump.