aText Is A Mac Text Expansion App That Costs Less And Does More


Mac: We love text expansion because it can save you hours of typing every day. There is a wide variety of apps available for Mac, but they tend to be quite expensive for minimum features. Fortunately, aText comes packed with features for not a lot of money.

Intelligent Organisation

The first thing you look for in a text expansion app is the ability to create typing shortcuts that you can search and organise. With aText, you can filter your snippets instantly and organise them by folder groups that have their own, specific behaviours. For example, you can make one group that expands only after you type a space in Microsoft Word, and another group that expands after any character in any app. Aside from simple organisation, you can set specific behaviours for your groups as well.

Comprehensive Variable Support

Text expansion apps truly shine when you can introduce a wide variety of variables into a snipper, and aText offers the best options I have seen. Not only can you insert things like the date, time and clipboard in a variety of formats, but aText can control cursor and keyboard positions as well. You can include snippets inside of snippets. You can create fillable forms when you want multiple variables in one snippet, which I find to be the most useful feature in a text expansion app. You can even insert images and rich text, or use snippets to run AppleScripts and shell scripts. Your options are essentially unlimited.

Better and Cheaper

Most text expansion apps don’t carry features like these and still cost upwards of $20. You can currently download a free trial of aText for 14 days and purchase a licence for $5 from the developer’s site. While not on the Mac App Store at the moment, it will be there as soon as Apple approves it. If you’re currently using Text Expander, TypeIt4Me or Automaton, aText will import your snippets. Whether you’re currently using text expansion or not, you really owe it to yourself to give aText a try. Thanks for the tip, Emir!

aText ($5) [Tran Ky Nam Software]


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