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Can you help me decide to buy the Powerpack?


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I apologise if I'm asking a repetitive question (but I did try to search for similar posts first). I used to love AppleScript, and I'm disappointed that I can't do as much with it as I would like. Alfred looks very good. I'm this close to buying the lifetime powerpack, but I don't completely understand what Alfred is capable of (and what it's not).

  1. One repetitive task I have is correcting text generated by dictation software. I would like to use Alfred (and AppleScript?) to systematically replace phrases with my corrections, as the dictation makes the same "errors" and I'm unable to retrain it properly. Is this the sort of thing that Alfred can help with? (just a made-up example: every text file contains "Deer Sir or Madam:" and I want to change it to "Dear Sir or Madam,")
  2. I'm paying a subscription for TextExpander, which replaces text but also includes macro-style replacements. Could Alfred make TextExpander unnecessary?

I'm a teacher, and a language learner. I do a lot of word processing and dictating. I use macOS tags a lot. I use TextExpander a lot. I'm not entirely sure how Alfred would work for me, so any suggestions are welcome. It's sort of difficult when a new user isn't quite sure how to make the most of a new 'thing' like Alfred.

(I'm not quibbling about the price - it seems reasonable. I just want to make an informed decision.)

Thanks!

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The answer to item 1 is probably, but the approach will depend on whether you want it to work everywhere in the system or just in a specific app.  And whether you want to correct an entire document at it once or just act on selected text.  Either way it will require some scripting and probably in a language other than AppleScript.  

 

The answer to item 2 is also probably.  Some relevant forum posts:

 

 

 

The biggest reason not to use Alfred for text expansion, I think, is that there's no iOS keyboard.  I get around this by having Hazel monitor Alfred's snippets folder and automatically create a TE snippet which then syncs.  Lately I've added a Hazel rule to also sync Alfred snippets to Copied b/c I was so sick of the lousy old TE (pre-subscription version) keyboard on iOS.

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Oh thank-you very much, dfay, for your thorough answer! I didn't need much of a push, put you've given it to me. The only thing I'm worried about now is falling down a rabbit-hole of Alfred-inspired experimentation. What if I spend more time playing with Alfred than the productivity time I will gain? 😉

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