Reliable Syncing of Textexpander Snippets

An essential writing productivity tool is the capability to quickly enter information (mostly text) by using expandable keywords so you don’t have to retype or re-enter information. Text expansion capabilities exist in various applications like Pages and Textmate but there is a real advantage in having these capabilities system wide with all your applications. To do this on the Mac I use Textexpander and it is so useful once you have included it into your workflow that you never want to be without it.

To make all the information snippets available across all your computers requires a syncing solution. Textexpander supports Mobileme syncing but I have found Mobileme to be unreliable. A solution using Dropbox has worked for me. The 5 steps to Textexpander Syncing Nirvana pdf provides step by step instructions on how to setup the symbolic links to sync Textexpander preference files.

Probably something similar could be established for Launchbar which also uses text strings but in this case to launch applications, documents, search the Internet, and do all sorts of read-my-mind magic.

For Windows users, autohotkey, texter, and Launchy are alternatives which can be synced using the Windows version of Dropbox but there is no cross platform compatibility for these text utilities.