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Text manipulation: TextSoap; Typinator; Kebyoard Maestro
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Posted by Dellu
Oct 2, 2017 at 01:14 AM
I am very surprised that I cannot replace any of them by any other.
I was trying to replace the other two with KM. I was partially successufl; but, KM became total mess (too many macros).
Typinator turn out to be the best for doing a lot of textaul shorcuts, abbreviations, filling form etc.
For cleaning up texts, Texsoap seems the best tool. Typinator has Regex. I don’t know if it can do sequence of events to modify text.
What is your experience with these smart tools?
Posted by Hugh
Oct 2, 2017 at 09:10 PM
Frankly, I am not surprised that you cannot replace two of your utilities effectively with Keyboard Maestro. For instance, Keyboard Maestro is a terrific application and can do text expansion, but in my experience, any one of the three or four Mac specialised text expansion applications can probably do it better.
When I moved the bulk of my work from Windows to OSX ten or more years ago, one of the attractions was the degree to which OSX applications could work in harmony with one another. In my experience at the time this exceeded the capacity of Windows applications to be similarly interoperable; I don’t know whether that is still true today.
However, the consequence for me on OSX is that I have generally tried to “match horses to courses”. For each particular task that I have to do, I have tried to find the best applications for the purpose. I’ve relied on the harmony with which OSX/macOS applications generally work together to enable me to chain applications in workflows which I cannot imagine I would have been able to create ten years ago under Windows.
Obviously this has had a short-term cost penalty over trying to use one or two pieces of “Jack-of-all-trades” software (and may carry a bigger penalty in future if subscription charging starts to take a grip on the software market). But at least in my experience over the last ten years, in my professional work there has been a probable gain for me in greater efficiency and less frustration, knowing that I am probably at any one time using the best tool for the job.
Posted by Luhmann
Oct 2, 2017 at 11:38 PM
Alfred is highly scriptable and can interact with other apps. You do need to pay extra to turn on the workflow functionality, but it’s worth it.
Posted by Dellu
Oct 2, 2017 at 11:56 PM
Yah, I also forget about Alfred.
Since version 3.4, the snippets have been more powerful to the point it can almost replace Typinator.
But, there are a few things in Tyinator that I cannot replicate with the Snippets in Alfred.
1) Typinator (&KM) permits an interactive user input—unless they can be supported by some other means, the snippets in Alfred cannot do this (they can insert clipboards, do time calculations….but, the user input is not supported).
2) Application sensitive expansion: I want to keep Latex snippets to apply on my latex editors; and, markdown snippets in its own respective application. Typinator is very effective for that (KM also can do this)—the snippets in Afred cannot.
Keyboard Maestro and Alfred actually work together pretty well. Afred is more fluent on files, folders and web links: KM for manipulating applications—they converge at some areas (scripts)—KM is weak on the file (folder) side. They pretty much complement each other.
- Typinator falls in between the two. It looks like the other two can replace it. I had that impression before I tried. Once I tried, there are some beautifies in it that none of the other apps can replace.
As a general philosophy, I also prefer your (@Luhmann) approach: but, in practice, I always tend to use much more tools than I want to use, just like @Hugh. I am usually in conflict.
Posted by Paul Korm
Oct 3, 2017 at 09:32 AM
I have all four of the mentioned apps (Typinator, Alfred, KM, TextSoap). They each have their specific role on this machine (text expansion, app/file/web launcher, complex dialogs and menus, fix text issues, respectively). Maybe I wouldn’t have bought Typinator because I already had KM, but I did, and now I wouldn’t spend the effort (and considerable time) to now configure Typinator to do whatever the other three are doing.
I’ve never felt discomfited by have these and other tools, so I’m not grasping what the benefit of offloading three of them would be.