Don’t get confused between a snippet’s label and its abbreviation—the abbreviation is the magic key combo you need to make a snippet expand, saving you the time and hassle of typing out oft-used chunks of text.

Have you ever tried adding up the number of keystrokes you tap out in a day? We didn’t think so. But we bet you’d be shocked by the total. We were happily surprised when we saw how many keystrokes we’d saved—4,572—after a few days using TextExpander, SmileOnMyMac’s supersmart text-substitution utility. Speed typists might be skeptical about the app’s usefulness—and we might have sided with those skeptics before we installed it. In mere minutes, we created a couple dozen “snippets,” or chunks of text that appear in any application when you type certain shortcuts. TextExpander also allows you to limit the apps that certain snippets work for, which is useful for keeping your html snippets out of Word documents, for example.

But having recently found ourselves being forced to type one-handed due to an injury, TextExpander 2’s release could not have come at a better time for us to test it. Instead of fumbling one-handed for the keys to type Mac|Life, for example (why’d we insist on using that darn pipe symbol anyway?), all we do now is type ml. As soon as we hit the spacebar or Return, the snippet expands to Mac|Life with the friendly—and deeply satisfying—sound of a bubble popping. The cursor stays put, and we don’t have to worry about capitalization because we told TextExpander to ignore it and just watch for the right characters. The app installs as a new pane in System Preferences, making installation and use a snap.

The only downside to TextExpander is how quickly we got hooked on it. Switching between Macs initially sent us into a distressing withdrawal, which we relieved by installing it on both Macs and keeping the snippets on each computer synced via .Mac. (To do this, go to System Preferences > TextExpander. On the Snippets tab, check Synchronize with .Mac and make sure you have your .Mac username and password set under System Preferences > .Mac > Account. Also click the Sync tab and check TextExpander.)

If you don’t have a .Mac account, you can share snippets between Macs by pressing Command-S from TextExpander’s preference pane to save the group TextExpander Snippets on the first Mac to the location of your choice, emailing the file to yourself, or transferring it to the second Mac via an external drive. Then press Command-O on the second Mac to add the snippet group from a file. Another tip: When creating new snippets, know that the label and the abbreviation are two different animals. The abbreviation is the text you type to cause that snippet to expand. The label is the name of the snippet that appears in the snippets list. We’re not sure why SmileOnMyMac included both—all it did was confuse us during setup. Also, be sure to enable access for assistive devices (System Preferences > Universal Access > Keyboard) or TextExpander can’t do its thing.