TextExpander Date Snippets

Dates are important, but not enough to think about.

As a creative professional I have learned to keep good time sheets. This is how I make money and quote jobs. I also put a date on most everything I touch; filenames, notes, folders, etc. Having a date on a filename has been extremely valuable over the years. The only trick is it can be a pain to look up the dates when you are just trying to save a file or sort your downloads folder from the past day or week.

Enter TextExpander. I have been using TextExpander for almost a decade. TextExpander is amazing not only because it saves typing¹, it can do date math and when that is not enough, run shell scripts.

This makes it incredibly easy to date stamp the crap out of everything with very little mental effort. No more looking at a calendar to figure out what last Wednesday’s date was. I just let TextExpander do the work for me.

The only downside to becoming so reliant on these is that the Shell Scripts won’t run on the iOS version of TextExpander. But the Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday versions still do.

The latest versions are available on GitHub: https://github.com/brandonstephens/bs-date-snippets

Snippet Overview

Example for the date Tuesday August 26, 2014.

abbreviation	name	example output
xdltu	Last Tue	2014-08-19
xdlw	Last Wed	2014-08-20
xdlth	Last Thu	2014-08-21
xdlf	Last Fri	2014-08-22
xdlsa	Last Sat	2014-08-23
xdlsu	Last Sun	2014-08-24
xdlm	Last Mon	2014-08-25
xds	Today	2014-08-26
xdnw	Next Wed	2014-08-27
xdnth	Next Thu	2014-08-28
xdnf	Next Fri	2014-08-29
xdnsa	Next Sat	2014-08-30
xdnsu	Next Sun	2014-08-31
xdnm	Next Mon	2014-09-01
xdnt	Next Tue	2014-09-02
d++	tomorrow	2014-08-27
d—	yesterday	2014-08-25
xdts	date and time	2014-08-26 10.09.10

Tomorrow

Content : Plain Text

%@+1D%Y-%m-%d

Yesterday

Content : Plain Text

%@-1D%Y-%m-%d

Today

Content : Plain Text

%Y-%m-%d

Last Day

Content : Shell Script

Just change line 2 of the code below to contain the day you want.

Valid names include: Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat and Sun.

#!/bin/bash
day='Fri'
today=`date "+%a"`

if [ "$today" == "$day" ]
then
VAR=$(date -v-7d "+%Y-%m-%d")
else
VAR=$(date -v-"$day" "+%Y-%m-%d")
fi

echo -n $VAR

Next Day

Content : Shell Script

Just change line 2 of the code below to contain the day you want.

Valid names include: Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat and Sun.

#!/bin/bash
day='Fri'
today=`date "+%a"`

if [ "$today" == "$day" ]
then
  VAR=$(date -v+7d "+%Y-%m-%d")
else
  VAR=$(date -v+"$day" "+%Y-%m-%d")
fi

echo -n $VAR

Give it a try?

Download TextExpander

Download Date Snippets

Footnotes

1. TextExpander has saved me typing over 500,000 characters so far according to its statistics. ↩