Text Blaze is the one Chrome extension I can’t live without

Chrome is a useful resource beast. I spend most of my day in the browser, hopping between Gmail, Asana, WordPress, Airtable, and a smorgasbord of web sites and companies, so I attempt to hold any extras to a minimal. That means no Chrome extensions until they’re work-required. There’s one exception to the rule, although, and it’s Text Blaze, a strong textual content expander that lives and syncs throughout all of my Chrome installations.

When I began utilizing Text Blaze, round three or 4 years in the past, I was in search of a textual content expander app for my Pixelbook that may work equally to TextExpander on my iMac. After setting it up and utilizing it for a number of days, I let go of the Mac app and utterly switched to Text Blaze as a result of it was actually cross-platform and I might sync it throughout each my iMac and Pixelbook. Better but, I might add the Chrome extension to each my private and work Chrome profiles, so I’d all the time have entry to it, it doesn’t matter what.

If you’ve used textual content expander apps earlier than, you in all probability know all the pieces Text Blaze can do. It affords snippets, dynamic components, clipboard assist, and cursor placement totally free customers, with extra (kinds, photographs, a number of customers) for paid subscribers.

But should you’ve by no means tried a textual content expander earlier than, let me clarify why this is a life-changer.

Text expander apps are like shortcuts that paste an extended little bit of textual content with a number of keystrokes. The best instance is to stick your full deal with once you kind one thing like /add for instance, otherwise you signature once you kind /sig, so that you don’t need to kind all the pieces up repeatedly.

Other examples embody template-like emails or replies and any little bit of textual content you typically have to kind. At a time when AI can write total paragraphs for us, who has time to repeatedly kind the similar factor? We’re all trying to save time, not waste it.

For me, a textual content expander like Text Blaze saves quite a lot of time in each my job and my on a regular basis on-line life. I typically write about merchandise out there in the EU or UK, however my keyboard doesn’t have the euro or pound symbols. To keep away from digging in the symbols menu every time, I’ve made a snippet that replaces /eur with € and /gbp with £, so I don’t break my typing stride when writing about costs outdoors the US.

Unlike my iMac, my Pixelbook — and most Chromebooks — don’t have an em-dash “—” image on their keyboard. It’s a personality I typically use as a author, so I’ve arrange a snippet to interchange /em with — and now I can rapidly and simply add an em-dash whereas writing on my Pixelbook. This alone is value putting in the extension for my very own use, ha!

Then there are different symbols. When I discuss Android apps, the /of shortcut inserts the overflow ⋮ image. When I wish to point out temperatures whereas reviewing telephones’ thermal efficiency, good thermostats, or smartwatches with a temperature sensor, the /deg shortcut will get me the ° image. All of those are small time-savers that add up over the course of a day’s work, not to mention every week, month, or yr.

But issues go to the subsequent degree when I begin digging into the Android Authority-specific shortcuts I’ve arrange in Text Blaze.

Our crew makes use of a set of particular instructions to insert a lot of the components you see when studying our articles. The TL;DR packing containers, opinion publish alerts, YouTube video embeds, highlighted pull quotes like the one under, FAQ packing containers, and extra are all dynamic components that we add on demand. There are buttons for these in WordPress, however I hate stopping mid-flow to succeed in for my trackpad, transfer the cursor, and click on a button. I will all the time select to kind over utilizing the mouse.

My Android Authority snippets don’t simply add the code for these components, although. They additionally velocity issues up by putting the cursor precisely the place I want it to be, so I can kind the textual content as wanted, like in the /pq pull quote snippet in the screenshot above.

For my YouTube snippet above, I’ve sped issues up additional by setting it up so it mechanically pastes my clipboard. Now, all I have to do is copy the video’s code from the URL, go to WordPress, and kind /yt to get the video to embed. This replaces the time-wasting 5-button course of the crew presently has in place.

Text Blaze can do a lot, way more than these “basic” snippets, with advanced kinds and tables, autopilot clicks and cursor actions, in addition to command pack integrations with Gmail and LinkedIn. Most of those are paid options, although, and fall beneath a $2.99-$6.99 month-to-month subscription. They’re not needed options for my very own use circumstances, so I stick to the free model.

After a number of years with Text Blaze, there’s no going again for me. This is the most helpful productiveness extension on my Chrome setup now. One of the first issues I do when establishing a brand new pc or Chrome set up is to signal into my account to sync all my snippets, in any other case I discover myself typing /em and /eur to no avail. I simply want Chrome extensions had been supported on Android natively so I’d have entry to my shortcuts when working from my Pixel Tablet.