ruminations

TextExpander is a incredibly useful Pref Pane plugin for OSX. The basic premise is that you define “snippets” and a delimiter. When you’re typing, you type a keyword + the delimiter and TextExpander will automatically insert the snippet for you. For example, I often have to sign my emails with different signatures. In Entourage, when I am composing an email, I can just type: “sig1′” and that automatically gets translated to “Cheers, Yi”.

One problem I’ve had with TextExpander so far is that it doesn’t offer syncing of your snippets unless you have a MobileMe subscription. Fortunately for us, it stores all the snippets and settings in a simple XML plist file in ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander/Settings.textexpander.

All you have to do to sync your snippets & settings across all your machines is to copy that file somewhere into your Dropbox directory and make a symbolic link (ln -s <src> <dst>) from the Dropbox location to your Application Support folder.