TextExpander thought snippets

What’s next? A TextExpander add-on that reads my mind circumnavigating my keyboard entirely? One can only dream about the future of text expansion. And a brighter future it seems to be every day. ‘Cause here in the real and now – even IRL1 for some of us – things are pretty fantastic, and they keep getting better.

The ever creative and able-fingered Brett Terpstra, as you may know, has whipped up a very useful web-based utility for applying your own abbreviations TextExpander snippets shared by others.

And right on the heels of Mr. Terpstra is the venerable Dr. Drang, who’s already served up a Python script that you should definitely check out before uploading your own snippets.

Since there’s so much interest in TextExpander these days…

As much as I use TextExpander every day, I often wonder how much text I’m still typing needlessly. I’ve dreamt of a tool that watches what I type for a few days,2 then does some kind of semantic processing to identify common phrases – phrases that I could hand over to TextExpander. A concordance report of sorts, you know?

So if you’re able, and you’re looking for ideas…