“Mac users have been able to create and use text clippings since the last century and Mac OS 9, but the feature remains relatively underexploited – despite being such a great way to boost productivity,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“What are text clippings?” Evans writes. “Text clippings are small chunks of text on your Mac. Easy to create, they are also easy to use: to add the text to anything you write in any application you just need to drag-&-drop the clipping to the document and the words in the clipping will be added to that document. The text can be long, short, or medium and it can contain HTML links.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We use an always-open TextEdit document as a repository for frequently used text, but Text Clippings can accomplish much the same.
Note that, in creating text clippings, after you select a chunk of text in, for example, Safari, click and hold on it for a beat in order to grab it.
In the meanwhile goog blows our minds with their AI initiatives..
For heavens sake ” text clippings” …… ??!
Are you totally nuts? Those two things are not even close to being related…at all…in any universe.
This is simply a little blurb about a function in macOS that has been around as long as I can remember.
If you want to really debate Google its products relative to Apple and its products, then that is an entirely different subject.
Mel, yojimbo’s feature envy is actually valid. Apple under Cook is almost always last to market with a feature, and when it finally does arrive, the performance and interface DO NOT significantly outperform the innovators who got there first.
Timmy blew it with Maps, he blew it with Siri, he is spending billions to recover from blowing it with Netflix-like streaming services, and Cookie is well on his way to blowing useful AI tech.
While Apple chases animoji and snapchat imitation features, turning messages into a teeny bopper playground lite social app, Google announces stuff like AR Measure:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/googles-ar-measure-app-comes-to-all-arcore-android-phones/
Of course all the fanboys will claim that the Google app is inaccurate now, which it probably is, but it will improve and Apple will be still working on getting overpriced Qi charging mats out the door.
Meanwhile, Emacs has been doing that for… Well, probably much longer than Mac has. Yeah, it’ll be great when Siri can suggest text insertions, like it can with words now. Me: Why can’t you do that, Siri? Siri: I’ve been wondering that myself.
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Text replacement works better than this…
Once the text is selected, Comm C, cursor placed, Comm V is damn quick.
So how is text clippings better? Maybe equal, but I mostly use copy & paste as it is more exact when I need to place the text as opposed to just adding it to the end of a document.
The main difference is that a text clipping is stored as a file, so you can use it now and tomorrow and next week. Try that with copy-and-paste…you would have to open the source material, locate the text, highlight it, and Cmd-C.
If you have frequently used snippets of text, then this is one possible way of storing and using those phrases in multiple applications. I am not claiming that it is the best way, but it works.