Random Flux

Version 1.2:

Cursor position: The 1.2 version now supports the caret/cursor position macro. This will work reliably provided your snippets don’t contain the clipboard pasting macro or date macros that use full month and weekday names or date numbers without leading zeros. All these things will throw the position count off (AHK doesn’t have a “put cursor here” macro).

Version 1.1:

The 1.1 version adds the following improvements:

Expand mode (immediately, at delimiter with keep/delete) is read from TextExpander and exported to the AHK script.

Abbreviation mode (case sensitive/ignore case) is read from TextExpander and exported to the AHK script. However, “Adapt snippet to case of abbreviation” does not work in AHK – at least, I haven’t been able to make it work.

The keep/abandon delimiter macros in individual snippets are now evaluated and work correctly in AHK.

Limitations and Caveats:

This solution isn’t perfect, but it still works very well for most purposes. Here are the main limitations:

One-way only: You can only convert from TextExpander to AutoHotKey, not the other way. TextExpander’s XML files are radically more complex than the simple .ahk scripts and converting back in the other direction would be a major project. I may get around to it eventually, but not soon.

Plain text only: The formatted and binary content of snippets is ignored, only the plain text versions of each snippet are converted.

Limited HTML entity conversion: At the moment only the most basic HTML entities like < and > and & are converted. Adding more should be trivial, however, just add them to the sub charReplace routine using the same patterns that you see there for the other conversions.

No nested snippets: Support for nested snippets is not possible in AHK. Nested snippet macros are replaced by $$$snippet_name$$$.

Cursor position: AHK doesn’t have a macro for setting the caret (text insertion cursor) position. The converter calculates the position of the macro in the TextExpander version and then backspaces to that position after pasting the text in Windows. This will not be accurate in snippets that paste text from the clipboard or snippets that use date macros that paste the full names of months and weekdays (there’s no way to know exactly how long the string will be then, it depends on the current date).

Using the Converter Script

1. If you haven’t already done so, download AutoHotKey and install it in Windows. You don’t need to configure anything in AutoHotKey — once it’s installed you’re ready to go.
2. Now download the perl script and unpack it on your Mac. You can put it anywhere but it’s practical to save the tx_conv.pl script file in the folder where you want to put your converted files. If you’re using the Dropbox solution (see below) you should keep your TextExpander files, the script and your converted AutoHotKey files all in your Dropbox folder. Then everything is much easier and you never need to copy anything between computers.
3. Open the tx_conv.pl script file in your favorite text editor and enter the path and name of your TextExpander settings file in the configuration section at the top. The file is normally called Settings.textexpander and is normally located in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/TextExpander/. You must enter the full path to your Settings.textexpander file! Using the ~/ prefix for your home directory won’t work. Also, you must escape any spaces in the path with a backslash. For example, if your user name is tomtom then your input file config line would look like this: my $textexpander = “/Users/tomtom/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander/Settings.textexpander”
4. Open a Terminal window on the Mac, change to the directory containing the script and type the following command: chmod a+x ./tx_conv.pl — this will make the script executable on your system.
5. Enter the following command in the terminal to run the script: ./tx_conv.pl
6. Then copy the .ahk output file to your Windows machine and double-click on it to load it. If you want to load the script every time you start Windows just put a link to it in the Startup folder inside your Programs folder for All Users (Explorer All Users > Programs > Startup). That’s it!
7. For further details on using AutoHotKey see the AHK help file. 

Setting up the Dropbox Solution

(These instructions are adapted from information provided by the support staff of SmileOnMyMac, the makers of TextExpander.)

On your primary Mac machine:

1. Download and install Dropbox and set up a free DropBox account. You get 2GB with the free account, which way more than you need for synching your snippets.
2. Close System Preferences
3. In the Finder, go to your Dropbox folder and create a folder called “Library.”
4. Drag the ~/Library/Application Support/TextExpander folder to your Dropbox/Library folder.  Your TextExpander settings and snippets are now stored and synched with your Dropbox.
5. Open a terminal window and type the following command to create a symlink for TextExpander to your DropBox folder: “ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/TextExpander ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander”

This symlink will redirect TextExpander to your DropBox folder to grab the snippet information.  Note that you won’t get any sort of confirmation in the Terminal that this operation succeeded.  You can confirm it by going to ~/Library/Application Support and checking to see if the TextExpander folder is an alias now.

On your other Macs:

1. Install Dropbox and link it to the account you set up on your main Mac. The files you put there on your main Mac will now appear there automatically, synching over the Internet.
2. Close System Preferences
3. Delete the ~/Library/Application Support/TextExpander folder.  Your TextExpander folder is already in your Dropbox, so we just need to symlink to it like we did on the primary machine. (If you don’t like the idea of deleting the folder just rename it.)
4. Open a terminal window and type the following command “ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/TextExpander ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander”

As on your main Mac, you won’t get confirmation in Terminal but you can check by looking in ~/Library/Application Support, where you should see TextExpander as an aliased folder.

On Windows:

1. Install the Windows version of Dropbox and link it to the account you set up on your main Mac.
2. That’s really all you need to do here. If you output your .ahk AutoHotKey script file to your Dropbox folder it will be available directly on your Windows machine without any copying etc.
3. You may also want to put a shortcut to your *.ahk file in the Startup folder on in your Windows Start menu, then your snippets will be loaded automatically every time you start Windows