"[Auto Text Expander for Google Chromeโข] (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-text-expander-for-go/iibninhmiggehlcdolcilmhacighjamp)" is an extension that lets the user define certain keystroke strings should be translated into other strings. I use it to make special symbols and favorite emoji easier to enter.
Installing the extension in Google Chrome, then importing the contents of the auto_text_expander.json
file contained in this GitHub gist makes it easy to keep my favorite replacement strings available. It's helpful if I were to use someone
else's computer or to keep the replacements in sync across multiple Google Chrome profiles on my own computer.
Using the preferences from this gist, when I type ":)", I get "๐". Other examples:
| I type | I get |
|---|---|
"**==" |
"๐บ๐ธ" |
";bug;" |
"๐" |
"?!" or "!?" |
"โฝ" |
";time;" |
"2016-11-17T13:26:24.383-0500" |
And so on.
I like the emoji macro support in GitHub's Markdown editors. They allow entering ":bug:" to get ":bug:" ("๐"). They're provided by
GitHub's "gemoji" package in db/emoji.json (raw JSON).
I'd like to load them all into Auto Text Expander, unfortunately the extension only supports 510 shortcuts or up to 102400 bytes, both of which are Google Chrome's storage hard limits. So I've picked only the ones I use most often and add more to the list as I need them.
I've noticed that some websites, like Bitbucket, may support the same emoji macros, but instead of inserting the emoji characters, they insert an image of the emoji character. That's good to allow a web site to change emoji styles or let the user see the emoji even if their computer doesn't support them, but sometimes I want the real emoji character on those websites. For that reason, I've switched from using colons (":") to semicolons (";") as my macro delimiters. (Semicolons are slightly faster to type, too.)
Until Auto Text Expander supports exporting and importing settings from a user-specified URL, consider workarounds:
- Make a bookmarklet to read settings from a URL (to raw
auto_text_expander.json, for example) and place it in the clipboard for pasting into the ATE import/export dialog. - Make a bookmarklet to use the contents of the import/export dialog and publish it to a URL, for example, like that of
auto_text_expander.json.