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BlogThe third time you type it, stop

The third time you type it, stop

You are not a slow typist.

You typed the same intro, the same incident reply, the same โ€œgot it, conclusion on Monday,โ€ in chat, mail, and the ticket tool. By the third time your fingers are bored before your brain is.

Text expansion is not โ€œtype faster.โ€ It is โ€œthis sentence is finished; it does not go through the keyboard again.โ€ CodeExpanderโ€™s loop: type an abbreviation in whatever is focused, press the trigger (default Tab), the abbreviation is replaced. You do not open the main window first. You do not sign in first.

CodeExpander home

Three steps tonight

Do not build a perfect knowledge base. Make the sentence that already annoys you.

  1. Install and grant accessibility. Expansion is computed on this machine. Typing an abbreviation does not require an account. See Getting started.
  2. Create one snippet. Keep the abbreviation short but not an English word (xsig). Paste the finished signature. Leave โ€œrequire a trigger keyโ€ on so the first letters of sig are not eaten.
  3. Go back to mail, type xsig, press Tab. If it expanded, it is in the library.

Forgot the abbreviation? Type // for inline search, or open the search window.

Build it the third time you typed it, or when you can already see next week. Do not snippet a quotation you might use someday.

A snippet is not a note

A snippet has an abbreviation, a body, optional extra files. Groups are a namespace your hands can see; a prefix lands in the abbreviation. See Groups.

The library is for hands, not a wiki for coworkers. The main window is not a notes app. Value happens in someone elseโ€™s text field.

Free is enough to close the loop

50 snippets, 5 groups. FillIn, capture, and OCR are included, with caps and a watermark. Buyout versus yearly is Buyout, yearly, or Team. Amounts live in Pricing.

Do not

  • Do not use ok, thanks, te. They fire inside English. Use xsig, zzbug. See Abbreviation hygiene.
  • Do not wait for a browser extension. There is no Chrome / Edge add-on. Desktop Outlook, IDEs, the terminal, desktop chat are system-wide expand. See System-wide vs extensions.
  • Do not sign in before you dare type. Offline, no account, the local library still expands.
  • Do not turn on sync first. Sync is an extra plaintext copy, off by default. Pasting a key does not enable it.

Next: A prompt that vanishes in the next window.

CodeExpander BlogA prompt gone in the next window