It expands in Chrome. Dead in Outlook
A recent wave of “text expanders” is Chrome form-fill.
Move fields between pages, optional AI rewrite. Leave the browser and nothing happens in the IDE, desktop mail, desktop IM, or the terminal.
CodeExpander takes the other boundary: if the OS can type, an abbreviation can expand. The cost is explicit: no official Chrome / Edge extension, no clicking a DOM <select> for you.
File/group ExpandIn: all apps, except, only these apps (Pro), disable. Search window and inline search stay unrestricted.
Settings → General → Trigger: master switch, require trigger key, key list, word boundary, adaptive case. Group ExpandWhen can override the boundary.
Choose the boundary
| Where the repetition lives | Use |
|---|---|
| VS Code, terminal, desktop Outlook, desktop Slack / WeChat | System-wide expand |
| One web CRM, the same form | A browser extension or that CRM’s macros |
| Both | Install both. Do not expect one to replace the other |
“Any text field” includes other people’s apps. That is why the permission prompt mentions accessibility or input monitoring. Expansion is computed locally. Signing in is not required. See Getting started.
Honest gaps
- No extension. “Read this column, write that column” on a website is not our loop.
- The website is not the snippet authority. The web library edits a cloud copy; the next desktop sync lands it locally. See Sync.
- The PWA is not an expander. A phone browser can manage snippets and copy body text to paste.
If you are coming from a Chrome-only tool, build the high-frequency replies first and fire them in the mail client. Keep the “scrape this page” flows in the extension or another automator. Abbreviations will not swallow them.
Related: Migrate from TextExpander, ExpandIn.