Last year Ergonis Software celebrated the 10th anniversary of Typinator, their text expander. Though the tool for auto-typing text and auto-correcting typos systemwide across all Mac OS X application has been around awhile, it’s as vital as ever.
One of the most useful features of Typinator is the possibility to create expansions based on regular expressions. The HTML expansions aren’t just text expansions that happen to contain HTML code, but rather a distinct expansion format that can be described in HTML. HTML expansions are useful for mail applications that support rich text messages, such as Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Airmail, Thunderbird, as well as many web-based mail services like iCloud Mail and Gmail.
With an inclusion mechanism, Typinator’s text expansions can execute external scripts and include their results in the expansion. The tool supports scripts written in in many different languages like AppleScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and arbitrary shell scripting languages.
The sets and rules in Typinator are visible side by side, which made it easier to move rules and makes the meaning of the buttons below the lists clearer. The utility comes with other goodies such as a list of built-in predefined sets, like autocorrection for English, German, and French, DOuble CApitals correction, auto-capitalize sentences, subscripts, superscripts, inline calculation, clipboard conversion, a HTML snippets set with over 100 abbreviations for elements of the HTML standard, and more.
With version 6.7, Ergonis made the software scriptable. This means that you can control many aspects of Typinator via AppleScript or JavaScript. Typinator 6.7 also expands the range of possibilities for using scripts in your expansions. Scripts can now be stored in compiled form. In addition to AppleScript, these scripts can now also be written in JavaScript.
Typinator 6.7 requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later. It can be purchased on the Ergonis Software website for approximately $32 for a single user license. A family pack for installation on up to five computers is $49.
For over a decade, Typinator has been automating the process of inserting frequently used text and graphics and auto-correcting typing errors for Mac OS X. It’s still doing a great job, so here’s hoping for another 10 years.
