I recently acquired a free license of Typinator through MacHeist and have been loving it. I put together a set of abbreviations for the text macros that Xcode provides and it has made my coding life much easier. A few folks have asked why I’m not using xctxtmacros and the truth is that I didn’t know about them. Either way, Typinator is working great.
You can download my set of Xcode Abbreviations here. Please note that it’s extremely limited as I only included those macros that I need most often. Leave a comment if there are any that you think I’m missing.
#1 by Martin Kühl on March 18, 2009 - 12:43 PM
As noted on Twitter, you could just use .xctxtmacros to accomplish basically the same thing.
The main reasons to prefer them over your set of abbreviations that I can see:
• When written properly, Xcode’s text macros can adapt to your coding style (as defined by the XCCodeSenseFormattingOptions defaults dict).
• A single macro can be set up to insert either a placeholder or the current clipboard/selection (I’m not sure which at the moment…), which is nice for bracketing expressions, say. (You’d have to create one abbreviation for a placeholder and a second one for the clipboard with Typinator.)
• You can bind keys to your macros in the Xcode Preferences. For example, I have ?[ set up to insert brackets, ^( for matching parens etc.
The downside seems to be that you can’t use non-alphanumeric abbreviation triggers for xctxtmacros (at least my Xcode won’t autocomplete them although they show up in the completion pop-up).
You might also want to check out ODCompletion Dictionary[1], if only for the huge set of abbreviations they provide. Or wait for me to tidy up my set of xctxtmacros (I’ve ported pretty much all of ODCompletionDictionary and still want to add a few TextMate-inspired scripts; ETA: Real Soon Now
.
In any way, thanks for sharing!
Cheers,
Martin (who needs an abbreviation for his name—it’s insane how often I mistype it…)
[1] http://obdev.at/products/completion-dictionary/index.html