I recently decided to remove a few no so frequently used applications. One of them was Typinator. It is a text expander - one of many. While I was researching if I can remove it and consolidate my snippets I stumbled upon a feature in one of the most used apps by me - Alfred. There are two messages if you are looking into Alfred text expanding capabilities - you can do it - yay 🎉 and it wont be so simple.
There are two types of text expanding in Alfred world:
- Simple - like expanding telephone number or date with cursor
- Complex - with multiple variables & selecting from a list of possible options.
I want to cover here the second one. To have complex text expanding you need to create snippet workflow. As a demo I've created conventional comments snippet workflow that ask me a couple of questions and pastes nicely formatted string into GitHub comment box. Workflow can be found on GitHub.
How it is working? At the beginning it ask me about label => which I can select from list; then I type title of my comment. Right after that workflow is pasting string:
**label** : title
{cursor_postion}
into currently focused input field.
You can see workflow in action below:
Summary
If you want to have text expander like capabilities in Alfred - it is doable via snippet workflow. You can start by looking into my conventional comments one.
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