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Quotes & accents (& Dashes) and TextExpander

Jessica Hische made Quotes & accents (& Dashes). Remembering keystrokes for these characters is hard, but for me remembering character entities is downright impossible. So I made TextExpander do the remembering for me. Here’s how I did it:

  • Get TextExpander (obviously)
  • (Optional: In TextExpander, create a new group. I call mine ‘Entities’)
  • Decide on a trigger key to type before each entity. I use the § as it’s a key I never, ever use for anything else 1
  • Set an abbreviation for each entity. Mine are:
Entity TextExpander
“ Left double quote “ § option + [
” Right double quote ” § option + shift + [
‘ Left single quote ‘ § option + ]
’ Right single quote ’ § option + shift + ]
– An en dash – § option + -
— An em dash – § option + shift + -

I’ve created TextExpander abbreviations for &, $, ©, …, £ and € too. Now when I need to code a character entity into my HTML, I need only type the trigger key, then the usual keystrokes for that character.

  1. Why use a trigger key? So I can still use normal keystrokes to insert those characters into other types of documents without TextExpander turning them into entities.

Written by Andy Clarke who tagged this with development


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