/snippets

My text expansion snippets for faster typing

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

snippets

This repo has my (public) text expansion snippets.

Text expansion apps allow me to save keystrokes when I'm typing common words – for example, if I type intl, my computer expands it to international. That saves me 9 keystrokes. It may not seem like much, but I use these snippets dozens of times a day and it quickly adds up!

This repo has a script that creates a collection of snippets to use in Alfred.

Why not use Alfred's in-app snippet editor?

Because I want to share snippets between my home and work computers.

Alfred can sync its preferences through some sort of cloud storage, e.g. Dropbox or iCloud. But I don't want to connect my home and work computers that way – I try to keep them separate. e.g. I don't log into my work email on my home computer, and I don't log in to my personal iCloud on my work laptop.

By putting my snippets in a GitHub repo, I can check out the repo on both computers and get the same set of snippets, but in a way that maintains the gap between the machines. Neither machine can directly affect the other.

I don't put all my snippets in this repo; just the ones I can make public. For example, my home computer has extra snippets for personal info like my phone number and my address. I configure those in the in-app editor, because I don't want to put them in a public Git repo and I don't need them on my work computer.

Usage

$ python3 create_snippets.py

This will create a new file Alex’s snippets.alfredsnippets, which you can open to add these snippets to Alfred Preferences.