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.
- Formatting dates with ordinal numbers
- 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
Using input fields for counters
The power tip "Input fields with default values" describes how you can preset input fields with default values. But there is much more about this feature. This tip describes how you can create a counter that you can overwrite with every expansion.
The trick is to combine input fields with variables and calculations. You can use a calculation in the form
{{expCounter=#expCounter+1}}
to increase the value of expCounter whenever the expansion takes place. You can then use the {{expCounter}} marker to insert the counter in this expansion (or in any other expansion). All this happens automatically, without user intervention.
But how can you override and reset the counter? For example, you may want to count certain events monthly and reset the counter to 1 when a new month starts. You can achieve this in the following way:
{{expCounter=?Monthly Count<{{#expCounter+1}}>}}
This may look weird and complicated, but it is actually rather straightforward when you dissect this into parts: {{expCounter=?Monthly Count}} asks for "Monthly Count" and assigns the entered value to the variable expCounter. {{#expCounter+1}} is a calculation that adds 1 to the previous value of expCounter. And inserting the calculation in angle brackets <> after "Monthly Count" makes Typinator suggest the result of the calculation as the default value.
Note that this marker assigns the entered input variable to the variable expCounter, but it does not produce a visible result. To actually use the value in multiple places in the expansion, use the notation {{expCounter}}.
Whenever you use this expansion, Typinator takes the previous value of the counter, increments it by one and suggests that in the input field:
You can then simply confirm the value or overwrite it with 1 at the beginning of the next month. And when you click the Cancel button, no assignment will take place, and the expCounter variable retains its previous value.
Note that this tip requires Typinator 5.7 or newer. Oder versions of Typinator do not support default values of input fields.