osxsub

A command line utility for using the OS X Text Substitution System Preferences in a unix pipeline. Like sed but for Mac users who are taking advantage of a mostly hidden system preference.

Basic usage is like this:

$ echo "Copyright (c) 2013 Mark Wunsch" | osxsub
  Copyright © 2013 Mark Wunsch

Text Substitutions are available for a handful of Mac applications, and can be set up by going to System Preferences -> Language & Text and selecting the Text tab.

Read more about OS X Text Substitution:

• How to use text substitution in Snow Leopard -- Macworld
• Mac 101: Making Text Replacement Work -- TUAW
• Do Yourself a Favor: Set Up Mountain Lion’s Built-in Text Expansion with These Shortcuts -- Lifehacker

The goals for this program are:

• Backup your text substitution preferences, along with the ability to
• Load new preferences, so that you can
• Share substitution preferences across machines, and
• Have access to them in a greater set of applications, by
• Allowing Text Substitutions to be a part of your command line toolkit.

Some more options can be given to the tool to make managing your Preferences easy:

$ osxsub --print
## Print a plist of your substition preferences

$ osxsub --merge PATH_TO_PLIST
## Merge another plist into your preferences.

$ osxsub --add REPLACE,WITH
## Add a new pair of substitutions (they're turned on by default).

$ osxsub --clear
## Clear all your preferences.

$ osxsub --repl
## Start an interactive session to test out substitutions.

Installation

A Homebrew Formula is available, but has yet to be moved to the master Homebrew repo: https://gist.github.com/4657560

Alternatively, osxsub is available as a Rubygem.

$ gem install osxsub

Or clone the repository and put the bin directory somewhere on your $PATH.

TODO

• Manpages
• Documentation
• Tests

Copyright © 2013 Mark Wunsch.