I'm settling into week #2 of life on a Mac and I decided it was time to address a feature I was sorely missing: the ability to insert the current timestamp via a simple keystroke. Consider this use-case: within ChangeLog's I'll include the timestamp a patch was released, and while typing 20 or so characters is hardly a deal breaker, it's clearly annoying to have hand enter the current date and time.
Surely OS-X had a simple solution for this challenge.
Initially, I was psyched to find this automator solution to the very same problem, but I never could get it to work. Finally, at the suggestion of this post I installed and configured TextExpander to do the job.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKIQGaC8ib8RO7FWc7i1CTHURHmJv72d4qbf-Kfq4CFS8MFBCdFVVHbQa4eoMwn22Mb7xvc49hvBE6_IQN1wX2b9SU31Qp5s1I7952US2IFcFoFHIm_TW5Vj9BJrEpK1w-sOu4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-01-03+at+12.46.36+PM.png)
For the 10 minutes I've had this solution in place, I'm liking it. For one thing, TextExpander let's me write shell scripts, which means that I don't need to learn the macro language that comes with it. And for another, the system is text based rather than keyboard short-cut based. So I need only to remember to type 'TS' and the current date will appear, versus trying to recall if I need to hold down Windows + Alt + Shift + T to do the same job.
I don't yet have a sense of how TextExpander fits into the larger Mac ecosystem. Is it a utility I can trust and should pay for? Not quite sure yet. Sure, I miss my autohotkey, but I'm going to try to roll with this for now.
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