Jumpcut is basically just a clipboard manager. This is a class of application that sounds extremely geeky unless you think about how often you copy/paste. Something about IT seems to require an absurd amount of clipboard usage.
There’s lots of applications that I guess started as just clipboard managers but overtime morphed in a Frankenstein’s monster of unwanted features and eye burning UI choices. Jumpcut does two things 1) Gives you a history of items you’ve copied to the clipboard 2) Scrubs formatting (HTML, Word, whatever) from text.
Rather than press Command-V to paste something, I press Control+Option+V. This pops up the Jumpcut UI which shows the most recent item on the clipboard. If you keep holding Control+Option you can use the up and down arrow keys to pick what to paste.
Really its one of those things you just need to try and then I’m pretty sure you’ll wonder what you did without it. Also its free.
TextExpander is an extended version of the text shortcuts in OSX and iOS (“omw” becomes “On My Way!”). For instance I have a few really lazy shortcuts (TextExpander calls them snippets) like ;am becomes “administrator” and ;gm becomes my email address. Of course you could just do that with the expansion built into the OS.
Where TextExpander comes alive is with “Fill-ins”. Another snippet I have is ;gpom which pops up a prompt asking me for a commit message and then expands to this (as well pressing enter between each line)
git add -A
git commit -m "whatever I just typed"
git push origin master
Anything that you type regularly can live in TextExpander. I keep video/phone conference information in there. I have some form letter type emails that I keep in there that are similar to the git message and automatically enter a subject and body and tab through fields in Outlook.
There’s a little statistics pane in TextExpander. Its apparently auto typed 68,854 characters for me. Not too shabby.