2025-02-03 Mon
- #Work
- #Idea
- Rosetta Stone for IDEs or languages - I wish there was a site that let you search in natural language for a given feature to see its equivalent in another language.
- #Discovered
- #Filed
- #Research
- Text Expander/Minus Keylogging
- I'm looking for a type of text expander that isn't scanning your keystrokes, but is instead initiated with a keyboard command.
- Reddit/macapps
- Text/Expander/Apps
Top 8 Text Extention Tools You Should Know
- - Text Expander/App/Textexpander
- Textexpander is a lightweight text expansion app for Mac and Windows. With a simple and intuitive interface, this auto text expander makes it easy to define custom snippets and insert them into documents, emails, forms and more with just a few keystrokes.
- Cross-platform availability on Mac, Windows, iPhone/iPad
- Robust library for organizing a large number of snippets
- Sync snippets across all your devices
- Type custom abbreviations to insert snippets
- - Magical
- Magical text expander is an intelligent text expander for Mac that aims to maximize productivity. It provides convenient shortcuts, schedules, and templates to automate frequently used text.
- Tight integration with macOS for system-wide use
- - Espanso
- Espanso is an open-source, cross-platform text expander tool. It provides robust functionality through an extensible system of packages and plugins.
- Open-source with active community support
- Highly customizable via YAML config filess
- created Reddit/Post - Reddit/commandline
- command line text lookup tools similar to text expanders? : r/commandline
- my op
- I'm looking for an open source program I can quickly activate to look up prompts, emojis or text snippets. I would prefer the lookup to support fuzzy matching and provide incremental suggestions.
- Some people recommend text expanders for this purpose, but I'm reluctant to use programs that intercept keystrokes; see also https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/12wb55l/lets_talk_text_expanders/ where the assumption in the comments is that all text expanders function as keyloggers and are therefore a security risk.
- Certainly there must be some class of organized, quick-look-up text tools that *don't* function as keystroke interceptors, and are instead operated by entering a command to activate another program, then entering input in the 2nd program and getting back a result.
- After looking around a bit, it seems like MOST of the popular text expanders intercept keystrokes. Virtually all the options recommended in https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1h1j6ra/best_text_expander_alternative_heading_into_2025/ are keystroke interceptors.
- For example, one of the more frequently recommended options, espanso, intercepts keystrokes: https://espanso.org/docs/get-started/#understanding-matches .
- It seems like the command line might be the most favorable candidate for this; one can set a global hotkey for a terminal, then quickly activate it and enter a command. Zsh supports fuzzy matching. Certainly someone has connected the dots into a program or a framework. What recommendations do you have in this direction?
- I'd prefer options that are aimed at technical users in security-conscious settings.
- I came to write this post after creating my first oh-my-zsh zsh autocompletion plugin codekiln/macos-system-settings-zsh-completions: zsh plugin for opening up MacOS system settings, and realizing that zsh could probably do everything that I need it to do. I realize I could probably start developing a solution myself, and I very well may in time, but first I'd like to get a sense of the prior art in this area.
- comment one