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Finding man pages on the web with TextExpander 4

June 30, 2012 at 9:42 PM by Dr. Drang

You know by now that TextExpander 4 is out and that its fill-ins feature comes with more options: default values, multiline text fields, optional sections, and popup menus. You can read about them on Smile’s site or see them in action in David Sparks’s screencast. I haven’t started digging too deeply into the new stuff, but the popup menu did inspire me to write a snippet I’ve been meaning to make for a while.

I often write about Unix commands here, and when I do, I usually link to the command’s man page on Apple’s site so readers can learn more about the command than what I cover. That means I first have to find the page myself. The best way to do that, I’ve found, is to use a specific set of Google search terms. For example, if I want to go to the man page for pbcopy, I’d type

pbcopy name synopsis site:developer.apple.com

into Safari’s search field (or the omnibar if you’re reading this after Mountain Lion comes out and Safari no longer has a dedicated search field). Since everything except “pbcopy” is boilerplate, this is a perfect candidate for a TextExpander snippet, with the name of the command as the fill-in.

But I can do better. Since the Linux versions of some commands are quite different from the Mac versions,

1 and I’ll sometimes want to point out those differences, it’d be nice to be able to search for a man page on linuxmanpages.com, too.

Before TextExpander 4, I’d have to write two snippets, one for each site, but with the new popup menu feature, I can put both types of search into a single snippet.

TextExpander man page web search snippet

The content of the snippet is

%filltext:name=command:default=sort:width=20% name synopsis site:%fillpopup:name=site:default=developer.apple.com:linuxmanpages.com%

where the first chunk between the percent signs defines the fill-in for the name of the command,

TextExpander single line fill-in

and the second defines the popup menu for choosing the site to search,

TextExpander popup menu fill-in

Since I write mostly about commands on OS X, I made the Apple site the default in the popup. The abbreviation is ;man, following my standard format for abbreviations.

Like most TextExpander snippets, this wasn’t hard to make, but it is a timesaver.

  1. The Linux versions come from the GNU project and the Mac versions are derived from BSD. ↩

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