Today while I was going through my feed, I saw this this post from macosxguru over at Bicycle For Your Mind. It’s about his system for using snippets on his system. The TL;DR is that he has settled on Typinator and likes it a lot.
I use snippets a lot but use several systems—YASnippet, abbrev mode, and the macOS text expansion facility—but none of them work everywhere I need them to so I have to negotiate three different systems. YASnippet is different from the other two in that its snippets can accept input instead of just making a text substation like the others.
In his post, macosxguru mentions that his previous system for text substitutions was based on the Alfred snippet functions. I’ve been using Alfred for a long time and love it. A one time purchase of the power pack makes your Mac much more powerful. Still, even though I was vaguely aware of it, I’d never used Alfred’s snippet function.
After seeing it mentioned on macosxguru’s post I decided to try it out. It’s easy to specify text substitutions. I couldn’t immediately figure out how to trigger the substitutions manually so I just set them to trigger automatically. I usually don’t like that but so far it’s working out well.
Up til now, I haven’t found anywhere that the substitutions don’t work. That can’t be said of any of the other systems I was using. It’s particularly hard to find one that works with both Emacs and other macOS applications.
If you’re using Emacs on macOS, you should definitely look into Alfred. It plays very nicely with Emacs and my newfound snippets ability makes the combination even better.