Most iPhone text editors support only plain text (an iOS limitation, I believe), which makes it a real pain in the app to create useful little formatting tools, such as the bullet points above. However, many of the iPhone’s plain text editors do support a nifty little app called TextExpander ($4.99), which is a utility for setting up quick text macros.
TextExpander can’t run in the background like Pastebot does, but it is integrated into many apps (Notesy, Simplenote, etc.) so that it feels like a background process. This means you can type out “tyvm” and have the TextExpander instantly replace it with “thank you very much”. I don’t tend to use many of these little shortcuts because I’m still getting used to how to use the app , but one great little use case is the one I’ve shown in the screenshot above.
Here’s what the case-sensitive “Qq” macro I’m using boils down to:
- a a soft tab
- Create this by pressing Tab within any plain text editor on a computer and save the file as a .txt. Then sync that .txt file to your iPhone into your notes app of choice and copy that resulting soft tab. I’m getting specific with the instructions here because pressing the spacebar five times isn’t the same thing.
- a dash
- then a space
All of that is accomplished with just two quick taps of the iPhone keyboard, thanks to TextExpander. I chose the “Qq” macro specifically because it’s right beside where the Tab key would be on a normal computer keyboard.
The end result looks a lot like the bullet points you’d get in a rich text application, although the second line of a long bullet point won’t be indented like the first (there’s nothing to be done about that until the iPhone is updated to support rich text). It’s also worth mentioning that these bullet points look exactly the same in apps like Notational Velocity or TextEdit (since I copied the formatting from there), so that they sync perfectly from Mac to iPhone, and vice versa.
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