Scenario

You repeatedly use the same phrases throughout your day – your company name, thank you letters, acronyms, web links – and you think to yourself: this is ridiculous. Computers are made for repetitive tasks. There has to be a better way.

Resolution

Install aText for macOS.

aText replaces text shortcuts with entire words, phrases, or macros. For example, lets say you want to write out your company name, Honeycrisp, but you don’t want to type the entire word every time. You setup a text shortcut like !hc. When you type !hc, aText automatically replaces it with the full phrase of Honeycrisp.

Additional Information

Built-in text expansion

A basic text expansion feature is built-in to macOS, but it doesn’t work in all applications. Our clients have especially had issues expanding text in the Google Chrome. Needless to say, that makes the feature near useless for the majority of us.

Why aText?

Whether you call them text shortcuts, expanders, or accelerators, there are a lot of apps out there that do what aText does. So why aText? There are two reasons.

The first, aText provides what we feel to be the greatest value. aText is just a single payment of $4.99. In a world of subscription-based pricing, that’s a steal.

The second, aText is extremely small, simple, and doesn’t crash. While other apps may do more, they have a steeper learning curve. aText doesn’t slow down your work in other apps and yields results in seconds.

Macros

When macros are discussed in computers, people’s eyes usually start to show fear. Never fear, macros here just means that you can make simple forms and calculations. For instance, say you need to reply to an email to inform someone of a deadline. In aText, you can setup a text shortcut to expand to today’s date plus 12 days without doing any calendar math of your own.

Categories: Productivity

Luke Kumanchik

Entrepreneur, programmer, backyard farmer & Dungeon Master Extraordinaire.