Special Fields
You can place special fields into the snippet text. When these are expanded they will turn into the current date and time, or ask the person typing to fill in a field, or take the contents of another abbreviation and expand its snippet into this one. You can add any of these special fields to the snippet portion of an abbreviation by clicking on the abbreviations name then putting the cursor where you want in the snippet editor. Then just click on the 'Date / Time', 'Variable', or 'Abbreviation' buttons at the bottom of the screen.

Date and Time

To place the date and time into a snippet you add the code [@now(%I:%M:%S%p %m/%d/%y)@]. The [@now()@] adds the current date and or time and the part inside the () says how to format that date and time. Here are the fields you can add and what they mean...
  • %y - Year without century, as decimal number (00 – 99)
  • %Y - Year with century, as decimal number
  • %d - Day of month as decimal number (01 – 31)
  • %H - Hour in 24-hour format (00 – 23)
  • %I - Hour in 12-hour format (01 – 12)
  • %m - Month as decimal number (01 – 12)
  • %M - Minute as decimal number (00 – 59)
  • %S - Second as decimal number (00 – 59)
  • %% - Percent sign
  • %j - Day of year as decimal number (001 – 366)
  • %p - A.M./P.M. indicator for 12-hour clock\
  • %w - Weekday as decimal number (0 – 6; Sunday is 0)
  • %a - Abbreviated weekday name
  • %A - Full weekday name
  • %b - Abbreviated month name
  • %B - Full month name
  • %U - Week of year as decimal number, with Sunday as first day of week (00 – 53)
So in our example above [@now(%I:%M:%S%p %m/%d/%y)@] would expand to something like 11:28:03PM 07/06/09.

Prompts

A prompt field will ask you to fill in a value when the snippet is expanded. You add a prompt field to the snippet using the following code [@var(Some Name)@]. The [@var()@] part says that this will be a prompt. The part inside the () is what will be displayed to you when you are asked to fill in the field.

Nested Abbreviations

You can use nested abbreviations to allow you to adjust a large number of snippets at one time. For example, you can create one abbreviation with your address (say !add.) When you type this abbreviation it will expand to your full address. Now any time you create another abbreviation that needs your full address in it you can use [@abv(!add)@] instead of typing in your address again. When those snippets get expanded they will pick up your full address from the !add abbreviation and expand that as well. The advantage of doing it this way is if you ever moved you would only have to update the !add abbreviation and not all the other abbreviations. The [@abv()@] part says we want to include another abbreviation and the part inside the () is the name of the abbreviation to include.

Next Options