TextExpander is possibly the most useful piece of software I’ve ever used. I love Launchbar and Hazel, but nothing compares to TextExpander in terms of sheer power. There are so many email addresses, URLs, usernames and Markdown snippets that I would have to type over and over in the course of a single day that TextExpander probably saves me 15 minutes worth of extra typing every day. (Okay, maybe not 15, but this stuff adds up fast.) I’m looking at my statistics that TextExpander provides now, and it says that in the few months I’ve been using it, I’ve expanded 393 snippets, I’ve saved 5,242 characters and saved 0.22 hours at WPM.

I know it does’t sound like a whole lot, but that’s because I’m still not really using TE to its full potential. I mostly use it for things like mmail into my email address or iidont into http://idontknowifyouknowthis.com. At the same time, you could create a snippet like:
Dear (insert customer name here),
Thank you for your order of . We greatly appreciate your continued support and look forward to serving you in the future as well.
Sincerely,
(Your Name Here)
And you could trigger this with tthanks. I think you can see the value in this. Much in the same way that Hazel saves you time by helping you do actions that you do all the time automatically and easily, TE takes all those repetitive typing tasks and shrinks them down to just a couple characters.
I really love the way TE3 handles syncing and backup. You’ve been able to sync over MobileMe for a while, but now they support Dropbox as well for folks who don’t want to pay the Apple sync tax. It also backs up your snippets locally, and you can tell it how often to back up, and how many backups to limit itself to. I was about to create a Hazel action to clean up the backups but then I noticed that TE3 is smart enough to do that all by itself!
TE3 came out last year, but I didn’t pick it up until the end of the year, and I meant to write about it sooner than now. With the 3.0 release, TE is now a real application and not just a system preference. I’ve found it to be much faster now. You can download a demo of TextExpander 3 or purchase a license for $34.95 here.