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:

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.