Rita Al-Khoury / Android Authority
Chrome is a resource monster. I spend most of my day in the browser, switching between Gmail, Asana, WordPress, Airtable, and a variety of sites and services, so I try to keep any extras to a minimum. This means no Chrome extensions unless they are required to work. There is one exception to this rule, however, and that is Text Blaze, a powerful text extender that lives and syncs across all of my Chrome installations.
When I started using Text Blaze, about three or four years ago, I was looking for a text expander app for my Pixelbook that would work similarly to the TextExpander app on my iMac. After setting it up and using it for a few days, I left the Mac app and moved completely to Text Blaze because it was already cross-platform and I could sync across both my iMac and Pixelbook. Better yet, I can add the Chrome extension to both my personal and work files in Chrome, so I’ll always have access to it, no matter what.
Text Blaze is a text expander extension that saves me from typing the same thing over and over again.
If you’ve used text expander apps before, you probably know everything Text Blaze can do. It offers snippets, dynamic elements, clipboard support, and cursor position for free users, with more (forms, images, multi-user) for paid subscribers.
But if you’ve never tried a text expander before, let me explain why this will change your life.
Are you using an application or extension to expand text on your computer?
13 votes
Rita Al-Khoury / Android Authority
Text expander apps are like shortcuts that paste a longer piece of text with just a few keystrokes. The easiest example is to paste your full address when you type something like /Add For example, or signature when writing / He saysso you don’t have to write everything over and over again.
The forward slash (/) is a great symbol you can add to your shortcut. It and the text expander app help you differentiate between the normal case where you type the word “add” and the case where you intentionally want to insert your title.
Other examples include template-like emails or responses and any piece of text you often need to type. When AI can write entire paragraphs for us, who has the time to type the same thing repeatedly? We’re all looking to save time, not waste it.
Rita Al-Khoury / Android Authority
For me, a text expander like Text Blaze saves a lot of time in my job and daily online life. I often write about products available in the EU or UK, but my keyboard doesn’t have the Euro or GBP symbols. To avoid searching the list of symbols every time, I made a snippet that replaces /euro With € and /GBP With £, so I don’t break my writing stride when writing about prices outside the US.
Unlike the iMac, the Pixelbook — and most Chromebooks — don’t have an extended dash “—” symbol on its keyboard. It’s a character I use often as a writer, so I’ve prepared an excerpt to replace it /M With – And now I can add an extended dash quickly and easily while writing on my Pixelbook. This alone is worth installing the extension for my own use, ha!
Then there are other symbols. When I talk about Android apps,… /to The shortcut inserts an overflow symbol ⋮. When I want to mention temperatures while reviewing the thermal performance of phones, smart thermostats, or smart watches with a temperature sensor, / degree The abbreviation gets me the ° symbol. All of these things save a little time and add up over the course of a workday, let alone a week, month, or year.
But things go to the next level when I start researching Robot body-Specific shortcuts you set up in Text Blaze.
Rita Al-Khoury / Android Authority
Our team uses a set of specific commands to insert many of the items you see when reading our articles. TL;DR boxes, opinion post alerts, embedded YouTube videos, featured quotes like the one below, FAQ boxes, and more are all dynamic elements we add upon request. There are buttons for these elements in WordPress, but I hate stopping the middle flow of getting to my trackpad, moving my cursor, and clicking a button. I will always choose to type with the mouse.
Things take it to the next level when I start digging into my Android Authority shortcuts.
for me Robot body However, snippets don’t just add code to these elements. It also speeds things up by placing the cursor exactly where I want it, so I can type text as needed, like in /pq Drag the quote snippet in the screenshot above.
Rita Al-Khoury / Android Authority
For the YouTube snippet above, I sped things up even further by setting it up to automatically paste my clipboard. Now, all I have to do is copy the video code from the URL, go to WordPress, and write /yt To get the video to embed. This replaces the time-wasting 5-button process the team currently follows.
Rita Al-Khoury / Android Authority
Text Blaze can do much more than these “basic” snippets, with complex forms and tables, autopilot clicks and cursor movements, as well as command stack integration with Gmail and LinkedIn. However, most of these features are paid, falling within a monthly subscription of between $2.99 and $6.99. They’re not essential features for my use cases, so I stick with the free version.
After a few years with Text Blaze, there’s no going back for me. This is the most useful productivity extension in my Chrome setup right now. One of the first things I do when setting up a new computer or installing Chrome is sign in to my account to sync all my snippets, otherwise I find myself typing /M And /euro but to no avail. I just wish Chrome extensions were supported on Android natively so I could access my shortcuts when working from my Pixel Tablet.