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Comment by VengefulCynic | Hacker News Reader

TextExpander has always been straddling the markets of "casual consumer with $20 to spend on an app that reduces pain" and "professional customer willing to spend $199 to reduce major time costs." It looks like they've decided to focus on their professional customers... I hope that this works out well for them.

As someone who doesn't need $5/month of TextExpander services, this also leaves me in the market for a new solution.

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Give Keyboard Maestro [1] by Stairways Software (headed by Peter Lewis, author of Anarchie) a try.

No connection, just a happy user.

[1]: https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/

Just to chip in as another very happy user of Keyboard Maestro here - I have been using it for text expansion as well as more general macros and it has made switching to a Mac full time a pleasure. Combined with Alfred it takes 'power user' to another level.

I use it for as much friviolous stuff as serious things (http://i.imgur.com/YgE82eP.png) - having never used TextExpander, I've not had any problems with the text replacements. It's possible to open dialogs and very quickly make UIs too for more involved stuff.

Does Keyboard Maestro support text fields where it prompts you for input before sending the completion? For instance, TextExpander and aText let you write something like:

  :foo expands to
  
  Dear [name], thank you for buying our stuff. We like you, [name]!

Then, when you type ":foo", it prompts you for "name" and fills out the template with "name" inserted everywhere it's mentioned. This is enormously useful for form letter types of things, or even more esoteric uses like expanding HTML tags ("<[tag]>[content]</[tag]>").

There are a number of ways to do this. Native to Keyboard Maestro are:

Prompt For User Input [1] is the easiest method and allows you to build a form fully within the KM's GUI.

Custom HTML Prompt [2] lets you make a full HTML/CSS/JS form. I have never had need of this, but in principle you can leverage any web browser tools such as jQuery and Bootstrap to make a complex form.

Check out the KM forums for examples. KM also allows you to fully integrate AppleScript and shell scripts, so you could do all sorts of other crazy workflows.

[1] https://wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/action/Prompt_for_User_Inpu...

[2] https://wiki.keyboardmaestro.com/action/Custom_HTML_Prompt

Thanks to you (and everyone else) for the clarification. That's my single biggest need from a TextExpander replacement.

It's not as straightforward as TextExpander or aText, but it's possible to do so in Keyboard Maestro.

The macro: http://imgur.com/1oIhtJm.png

The prompt: https://imgur.com/esJt4gM.png

Keyboard Maestro macros consist of a trigger and an action. In the above example, I used the Typed String trigger to detect when "hhi" is typed then execute an action to create a prompt and paste the text with content from that prompt.

You can use prompts in the macro, save it to a variable and use the variable in the text it pastes/types.

>> As someone who doesn't need $5/month of TextExpander services, this also leaves me in the market for a new solution.

But presumably you can continue to use the pre-SAAS version of the software, right? At least until it stops working because of OS changes, etc.

Yeah... that's how I discovered aText, http://www.trankynam.com/atext, and I've been quite happy with it. It definitely scratches my itches.

Likewise, and it imports TextExpander macros (although you still have to tweak them if you use things like fields).

I have no affiliation with the aText guy except as a happy customer. I've been recommending it to my friends as a migration path off TextExpander because it works for me, but it may not work for you. It has a free time-limited demo, though, so it's easy enough to find out.

Try http://alternativeto.net/software/textexpander/?platform=mac for potential options

> leaves me in the market for a new solution.

Reluctantly, I will be looking too. We use linux at work and I have been using https://github.com/autokey/autokey there, but it is a little abandoned. I have to restart it with a cron job every 10 minutes, but it is fine otherwise.

I've heard good things about PhraseExpander [1]. Disclosure: built by a friend of mine.

[1]: http://www.phraseexpander.com/

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