TextExpander → Alfred 3.x

That’s a long overdue I wanted to write about.

TextExpander creators, Smile Software, announced back in April, 2016 they moved to subscription model. Although after an overwhelming response from the TextExpander users, the company offered a lifetime 50% discount for users upgrading from the previous version, I wanted to consider other options as I was not very happy with a subscription.

Luckily there was a new Alfred 3 release that has a new snippet feature. Since I was already an active Alfred user, it was the way to go!

What I needed to resolve is to migrate my current snippet database from TextExpander to Alfred.

I came across on a TextExpander conversion tool by Daniel Diekmeier. There is also the online version.

However, I decided to go with the github version.

installation #

brew install npm

npm install -g textexpander-to-alfred3

conversion #

textexpander-to-alfred3 Foreign\ Thanks.textexpander 
Wrote file /Users/igor/dev/text-snippets/Foreign Thanks.alfredsnippets

import to Alfred #

After conversion, double click on the converted snippet file with the .alfredsnippets extension. Alfred offers to import the database

Click import and it’ll appear under the Snippets/Collection in Alfred Preferences.

If you want to have the snippets auto expanded you need:

• Enable Automatically expand snippets by keyword
• Specify unique keyword for every snippet you want to have expanded