Typinator power tips
This page contains a collection of useful power tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Typinator. We hope you find some of these power tips useful for your work flow.
If you want to share your own power tip with the Typinator community, please contact us. We will gladly publish your contribution here.
Overview
- Advanced text formats and hyperlinks
- Convert clipboard to plain text
- Custom search terms in Quick Search
- Date Calculation for "next Saturday", etc.
- Input fields with default values
- Inserting multiple spreadsheet cells
- Inserting pictures in spreadsheets
- Inserting random text
- Literal {x} patterns
- Phrases depending on the time of the day
- Pictures with links
- Presets for options
- Quickly find a snippet
- Removing non-digits from numbers
- Replacement in the middle of a word
- The power of Typinator forms
- Triggers for expansions
- Typing abbreviations without expanding them
- Using input fields for counters
- Using Typinator as a clip collection
- Developer tip: Typinator, PopChar, and the Clipboard
Typing abbreviations without expanding them
You have this great abbreviation that translates "twso" into a text that describes this week's special offer, and now you want to tell your colleagues and friends about it. But whenever you write "twso" in a mail or twitter message, Typinator translates it, which is not what you want at that point of time.
Typinator comes with several features that let you easily type an abbreviation without expanding it.
#1: First, you can use Typinator's Pause/Resume commands to temporarily suspend expansions. If you need this frequently, you may want to assign a keyboard shortcut to this function in Typinator's preferences. To type an abbreviation, type the shortcut to pause expansions, type the abbreviation, then type the shortcut again.
#2: You can create an abbreviation that suppresses expansion of the next abbreviation. For example, create an abbreviation "##". In the expansion, click the {…} pop-up and select "Suppress next Replacement" from the "Control" submenu. This creates a marker of the form {X>}. From now on, when you want to type “twso” literally, type "##twso". When you type the two hash signs, Typinator deletes them and enters pause mode (indicated by two vertical bars in Typinator's menu bar icon). When you finish typing "twso", Typinator does not expand it and automatically leaves pause mode again.
#3: When you often want to write expansions in quotes, create a rule that encloses an input field between quotes, as in
"{{?Quoted text}}"
When the corresponding abbreviation is """ (that’s three double quotes), just type three quote characters, and Typinator displays a window where you can enter the "Quoted text". Enter "twso", hit the return key, and Typinator produces "twso" (including the quotes). The trick here is that Typinator does not expand abbreviations in input fields. Of course, you can change the expansion to your liking. You can, for example, use smart quotes around the input field or define a longer phrase, such as
Typinator abbreviation
“{{?Quoted text}}”