First, I have to make a personal confession — I never liked the SMS short-hand thingy that worked with pre-iPhone phones. That was one of the reason I seldom use SMS/Text-Messages unless I really need to.
I have been using text-expansion since the early days of TextExpander[1], an app that works on iOS and macOS. However good the iPhone keyboard was, it was always not convenient to type and retype details such as home address, home/work map, and many other work/personal related info. TextExpander helped a lot.
I started looking for an alternative when TextExpander converted to a subscription model, which I (personal) believe is not suitable for such a tool. I found a better alternative in Alfred[2], bundled with its Powerpack — Snippets.
macOS/iOS also has its built-in “Text Replacements” but it fails me quite often in non-Apple apps. What you have here is similar to that of Apple’s Text Replacement. I let that remain and the others are managed via Alfred. Honestly, I may move to this once I can totally walk out of Alfred (Spotlight is becoming good enough.)
However, I’d like to use a delimiter to expand so it does not come in the way of my normal typing (I can touch type). Currently, I use “,” (comma) as a delimiter (Affix) because, in English, there is always a space after a comma and my expansion is only after I type a comma and the short-text without a space. Also the comma key is located conveniently when you touch type.
If I do reconcile and stay with the OS’s Text Replacement, I might still introduce the delimiter to prevent automatic expansion of the word which wasn’t intended for that particular scenario.
The problem with "." as a delimiter is that, unlike written English, it is actually pretty common in the computer world -- for instance, file extensions -- .jpg, .txt, .md.
I have been using text-expansion since the early days of TextExpander[1], an app that works on iOS and macOS. However good the iPhone keyboard was, it was always not convenient to type and retype details such as home address, home/work map, and many other work/personal related info. TextExpander helped a lot.
I started looking for an alternative when TextExpander converted to a subscription model, which I (personal) believe is not suitable for such a tool. I found a better alternative in Alfred[2], bundled with its Powerpack — Snippets.
macOS/iOS also has its built-in “Text Replacements” but it fails me quite often in non-Apple apps. What you have here is similar to that of Apple’s Text Replacement. I let that remain and the others are managed via Alfred. Honestly, I may move to this once I can totally walk out of Alfred (Spotlight is becoming good enough.)
However, I’d like to use a delimiter to expand so it does not come in the way of my normal typing (I can touch type). Currently, I use “,” (comma) as a delimiter (Affix) because, in English, there is always a space after a comma and my expansion is only after I type a comma and the short-text without a space. Also the comma key is located conveniently when you touch type.
If I do reconcile and stay with the OS’s Text Replacement, I might still introduce the delimiter to prevent automatic expansion of the word which wasn’t intended for that particular scenario.
1. https://textexpander.com
2. https://www.alfredapp.com