Thanks to Taz Goldstein on Twitter, it came to my attention that my tool for generating downloads for my TextExpander snippets had partially broken. In the process of fixing it, I made some improvements.

If you haven’t seen it, the tool is called TE-snippets. It takes all of the TextExpander snippet groups that I have available in my TextExpander Tools project and makes it possible to customize the triggers and create a subscription link or direct download with the results.

The biggest update I snuck in while fixing it is the ability to use suffixes instead of (or along with, if you really wanted to) prefixes. Just set one or both in TE-snippets and it will be included in any customizable snippet triggers. Leave either or both blank to skip them. Note that some triggers aren’t set up to be customizable, but most are.

Why suffixes and prefixes? For a long, long time I started all of my snippets with a punctuation prefix, usually ,,, to separate the triggers from strings I might actually type. I’ve been using suffixes more and more; It’s a personal preference, but I always use one or the other. If I’m triggering the snippets after a delimiter (space, tab, etc.), I like to use a hyphen at the end. So ot- expands to Overtired after a space (but if I happen to be actually hyphenating a word, it doesn’t because the next keystroke is a character). I can keep the snippets short and still avoid accidental triggers, and using a consistent prefix or suffix makes it significantly easier to train the muscle memory that makes TextExpander ten times more useful.

So, if you haven’t checked out TE-Tools for a while, do it! Even if you’re not a TextExpander user, maybe my TextExpander Tools will inspire you to check it out. As far as I know, the snippet groups I generate will work on any of TextExpander’s supported platforms (including Windows, which I imagine is a bonus for dual-platform users).

While TextExpander frequently sponsors this blog and supports my work, this project isn’t paid for by Smile or TextExpander. This is just me being a huge fan.