Briskine: Email templates for Gmail

I've been using "Text Blaze", a text expander Extension for Chrome. After a recent "update", I decided that it was time to jump ship. I've tried several different Addons that allege to do the same thing Text Blaze, but of the handful, this Addon seems to be the only one that works as intended across all websites. Now, I'm aware this Addon is intended to be something to make e-mail templates with, but it seems to be the multi-platform version of Text Blaze in everything but name and presentation – at least, it can be set up to act similarly. Unfortunately, it does not perfectly replicate all functions. I'll explain. First and foremost, this Addon won't automatically replace or expand text. It requires manual activation via Shortcut key. This is somewhat easy to work around – I just set my Shortcut key to the Space Bar. However, this brings up the next issue. When triggering text replacement, the Addon tends to eat your input. For example, let's say you type "kr" and hit Tab. This would cause the letters to expand to "Kind regards, [your name]". This is fine… except in cases where you need the Shortcut key to actually do something other than be a shortcut key. I have several macros which replace characters. Ellipses, em dash, and even some emojis. Using Text Blaze, I'm used to being able to type my shortcut and hit Space to get the "expanded" text and a space. With the Space Bar set as the shortcut key, here, I end up getting my "expanded" text, but no space. For example, I have a shortcut that changes "trademark" in "™". If I type "trademark" followed by a space, I get "™" without a space on the end. To get around this, I manually added spaces to my shortcuts. And this… leads to another problem. Trailing spaces in shortcuts seem to get auto-replaced by " ", or Alt-255 (under Windows). At face value, this is fine. However, on some websites such as Google Search, this literally displays as "[shortcut] ". That's just silly, not to mention ugly. And finally, the Addon doesn't seem to have the where-with-all to realize that characters preceding a shortcut may not be part of said shortcut. For example, if I type "Soontrademark" and hit Space, I get "Soontrademark " instead of "Soon™ " (or "Soon™ ", as previously mentioned). Most auto-expanders or text replacers don't know the difference, either, so this is pretty normal. Text Blaze knows the difference, though, which is why I'm mentioning it. Anyway. It's a good and fine Addon that actually works correctly. But for my purposes? I have to pass on it.

Super helpful, simple, has saved me lots of keystrokes. Support team is great.