Text manipulation: TextSoap; Typinator; Kebyoard Maestro

Posted by Hugh
Oct 2, 2017 at 09:10 PM

Frankly, I am not surprised that you cannot replace two of your utilities effectively with Keyboard Maestro. For instance, Keyboard Maestro is a terrific application and can do text expansion, but in my experience, any one of the three or four Mac specialised text expansion applications can probably do it better.

When I moved the bulk of my work from Windows to OSX ten or more years ago, one of the attractions was the degree to which OSX applications could work in harmony with one another. In my experience at the time this exceeded the capacity of Windows applications to be similarly interoperable; I don’t know whether that is still true today.

However, the consequence for me on OSX is that I have generally tried to “match horses to courses”. For each particular task that I have to do, I have tried to find the best applications for the purpose. I’ve relied on the harmony with which OSX/macOS applications generally work together to enable me to chain applications in workflows which I cannot imagine I would have been able to create ten years ago under Windows.

Obviously this has had a short-term cost penalty over trying to use one or two pieces of “Jack-of-all-trades” software (and may carry a bigger penalty in future if subscription charging starts to take a grip on the software market). But at least in my experience over the last ten years, in my professional work there has been a probable gain for me in greater efficiency and less frustration, knowing that I am probably at any one time using the best tool for the job.