Text Expander and OmniFocus

Sven Fechner recently screencasted how he goes about using TextExpander with OmniFocus. Sven has an interesting workflow where he uses a task’s note section to track projects. I do something similar inside nvALT, not in OmniFocus. I do, however, use TextExpander all the time for repetitive phrases in OmniFocus. Since Sven threw down with a video, so did I. You can also download my favorite OmniFocus TextExpander Snippets below.

Download the Snippets

TextExpander + OmniFocus from David Sparks on Vimeo.

Since OmniFocus for iPad doesn’t support TextExpander Touch, you’ve got to use Apple’s own iOS shortcut tools. This is where it gets wonky. For reasons beyond me, the snippet cannot start with a period (.), so I start them with an “x”. Moreover, you can’t simply insert the cursor at the beginning of some text and expand. There must be a leading space. So, when adding a snippet before existing text you have to place the cursor, then advance a space, then place the cursor again back a space (there is no key to move the cursor backward), and then fire off the snippet. Tedious.