Text expansion

Type an abbreviation, get the full text. Text expansion watches what you type and replaces a short trigger with its expansion the moment you finish it – adr becomes your address, ovw becomes overeenkomstig, tabb becomes a tab character.

It is not the same as a text conversion, which acts on text you have already selected. Expansion has no selection at all; it works on the keystrokes themselves.

Editing expansions

Open Settings → Text expansions…. Each row is a trigger and what it expands to. Add, edit and delete, then save: Sidekick reloads and the new entries are live.

The entries live in data\expansions.json, alongside your other content. See Settings and files.

Built for thousands of entries

This is the one feature that has to be fast on every keystroke of every day, and a working translator’s list grows into the thousands. Registering entries one by one at start-up would cost seconds; instead Sidekick writes the list out as a generated script when you save and includes it, so five thousand entries load in a few milliseconds and typing costs nothing. Editing costs one reload.