Fill-ins in snippets (textexpander replacement!)

[wandering]

The new snippet feature is great. Would be even greater to have fill-ins in snippets.

 

Especially since Text-expander has become very expensive; this will be the perfect textexpander replacer!

 

Edited May 18, 2016 by realbase

[fredcallaway]

If I understand correctly, you are talking about a snippet that pops up a form where you provide values for fields (e.g. the addressee of an email). You can get that feature with aText, which is $5.

 

It would be awesome to have this for Alfred though!

[Shark.Formax]

Gotta throw my +1 in here. This is the only reason I am keeping TextExpander on my machine. (and the fact that it can run javascript snippets, but that's something I don't use as much). Thanks for your consideration.

[Jonathan]

Agree, fill-ins would be incredibly useful.

[slyfox]

+1 That is the only things that TextExpander has going for it.

[Ran]

+1.. Please.

[dfay]

You can do this with snippet triggers in workflows.

[deanishe]

12 hours ago, dfay said:

You can do this with snippet triggers in workflows.

 

He knows: I actually sent him to this thread because using Snippet Triggers is a cumbersome way to achieve this (especially if the snippet has multiple placeholders), and a real job of work if you have a large number of such snippets (as i believe @Ran does).

 

I’m still using Typinator for such snippets for that reason.

[Bhishan]

+1 I would also like to see this feature in upcoming version.

[Dede]

+1 I would like to see this supported. A very useful and obvious extension to vanilla snippets.

[shawnyeager]

Another upvote for fill-ins. This would close the gap for me.

[Chris Messina]

Superhuman just launched variables in their snippets and they handle fill-ins pretty elegantly... they provide a few well-known variables, and then you can create your own placeholders, and if there's no set value, Superhuman will prompt you for a value:

 

 

As a suggestion for a Workflow, perhaps if there's a placeholder without a value, the Alfred UI could pop asking for all the necessary variables in a sequence until all the placeholders are filled. 

 

I don't have time to tackle this right now, but it seemed like a clever way to approximate what's being requested here.

Edited June 23, 2021 by Chris Messina
added a link

[xurc]

Seconded, I would love to see this feature in Alfred as well. Meanwhile, if you find it hard to justify TextExpander's price, espanso is FOSS and have this feature.