Hey @Mark,
If you're just a casual user of snippets then there is little benefit to using a dedicated snippet manager – Keyboard Maestro is no slouch...
However. Typinator eats Keyboard Maestro's lunch in both snippet usage and management – so – if you're a really heavy user of snippets (as I am) it's a no-brainer to have a dedicated utility fine-tuned for the job. (I currently have about 50,000 snippets, although many of those are spelling corrections).
Advantages of Typinator:
- Easy to learn UI.
- Keyboard shortcuts for adding new snippets.
- Quick Search pick list for snippets with global and set-specific filtering (sold me after 10 minutes use).
- The app is AppleScriptable.
- Support for AppleScript and other scripting languages that run and produce a result in snippets.
- Compliments Keyboard Maestro – as KM cannot use text insertion macros when its own user-entry dialogs are running.
- Fillable forms – again compliments Keyboard Maestro.
- HTML expansions that allow sophisticated templates for rich-text capable email clients like Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Airmail, Thunderbird...
- Regular Expression triggers.
- Auto-Correction.
- Many pre-defined packaged sets for the user to choose from.
- I've only covered the tip of the iceberg...
As of today I have 75 different sets of snippets in Typinator.
I've been using snippet-expansion utilities since TypeIt4Me came out in 1990. It went through a fallow period several years ago, and I used TextExpander for a while. TextExpander was too buggy, had a poor search (at the time), and I had several bad experiences when communicating with its developers.
One day I was fussing about having too many snippets to remember, and I discovered Typinator with its excellent Quick Search. After 10 minutes usage I bought a copy and have been a pretty happy user ever since. The developers are quite responsive and have implemented a number of my ideas and requests over the last seven or eight years.
I would feel almost as lost without Typinator as I would without Keyboard Maestro (almost).
But as I mentioned – I'm a heavy snippet-user.
There's a demo.
The website covers much more of Typinator's functionality than I have above.
-Chris
EDIT: Typinator is up to version 8.9 as of 2021/09/09 20:30 CDT -ccs
Jan 27, 2023 – More write-up on Typinator by -ccs