Clever TextExpander clipboard snippet trick
The makers of TextExpander, a very clever time- and finger-saving snippet utility, have posted a nice tip 
on the company’s blog.
It explains how to make a “smart snippet” using TextExpander’s %clipboard variable, which is replaced by whatever is currently on the clipboard when the snippet is typed.
The original author of the tip uses it to create Amazon affiliate links for his blog on the fly, but obviously it has wider uses too.
For example, imagine you run a blog that attracts a lot of emails asking how to do this, that or the other thing.
You can quickly run up a snippet like this:
Then, when the emails start to arrive, all you need to do is navigate to the link, copy it to the clipboard and then type the snippet into the reply:
Suddenly more of your life is your own. Clever.
If I sat around here long enough I’m sure I could think of a dozen other applications for this tip, but you might have more fun thinking them up for yourself.
TextExpander costs USD 29.95 and is available from the developer’s web site .
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March 9th, 2007 at 1:07 am
For thunderbird, there’s Quicktext which allows for similar functions:
http://extensions.hesslow.se/extension/4/Quicktext/
With that, you’d simply use the [[CLIPBOARD]] variable.
March 9th, 2007 at 1:16 am
I love TextExpander (used it for a long time), but I recently switched to TypeIt4Me, which offers a virtually identical feature set (main difference is the UI, which is both better and worse in some ways), including the same clipboard functionality you describe, but it also allows you to trigger AppleScripts with abbreviations, which is very, very nifty indeed.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
you don’t even need the whole %clipboard phrase. You can go into TE’s prefs and make any abbreviation you want work as the clipboard variable. I prefer a shorter one (I use “xcb” - all my textexpander abbreviations stick to the alphabetic keyboard, lower case - it reduces the number of keystrokes needed to get the expansion going.
Another hint: it isn’t the smartest idea to auto-expand things like your credit card numbers - but if you must, simply break them into two different abbreviations, one using the first six numbers and the other using the last ten, or something like that. You’ll at least get a measure of security.