Text substitution/replacement support

By emmanouil.pais...@ige-project.eu on April 02, 2011 21:32 (imported from Google Code)

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Snow Leopard offers text replacement/substitution functionality for those programs that support it. One can set such substitutions from "System Preferences", "Language & Text" under "Text". These can be used from those by setting "Edit->Substitutions->Text Replacement" to enabled.

It's a useful feature especially when having to run similar commands on a variety of machines.

Thanks!

Comment 1 by gnach... on July 06, 2014 05:00

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I don't think this would work very well in a terminal since the relation between input and output is weak.

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Status: CannotFix

I think that there is a real need for something like this. I use quite often test-substitutions to introduce long pieces of text but I do understand why a normal implementation will not work in a terminal where each keystroke is already sent to the terminal so there is no change to un-send it.

How about alternative ways to implement similar behaviour? Maybe something linked to paste (Ctrl+V) behaviour?

Example: I would like to add shortcuts for installing:

• zsh: sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
• brew: /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

If you need a convenient way to paste a blob of text in, you can always bind it to a keypress with the send text action. I agree it would be useful to have a tool where you can paste in snippets of text, though.

I've opened issue #5386 to add a snippets tool to the toolbelt.