Custom search terms in Quick Search

Sometimes, you may find that Typinator's Quick Search command does not find what you are looking for because the desired item does not contain your search terms. It could be that you are looking for the wrong word (such as "buy" instead of "purchase"), or the expansion contains a Terminal command with cryptic keywords that you simply cannot remember, or the abbreviation and expansion are sophisticated combinations of regular expressions that do not contain any useful search terms, or the expansion contains a photo and just shows up as "Picture".

To make expansions easier to find in Quick Search, you can “enrich” them with descriptions and comments.

Descriptions

To add a description to an item, select it in the list of abbreviations, then click the blue speech bubble below the list and select "Add Description". As a shortcut, you can also double-click the expansion text in the list and start typing.

In the set list, descriptions appear as grey italic text: In this case, you can now search for "spec Jane" to find this special offer that was sent to you by Jane, even when "Jane" does not appear in the actual expansion text.

You can use descriptions also for pictures, so they appear with a meaningful title in the list and in Quick Search.

Comments

In addition to such descriptions, you can also add comments to text expansions. Comments have the form {{-- some text }}, and you can enter them anywhere in the expansion to describe the expansion or its purpose. You can add comments to plain text as well as formatted text expansions. When you type the corresponding abbreviation, Typinator removes the comment before inserting the expansion in the target document. In the above example, a comment could look like this:

{{-- purchase options special offer Jane }}

Setting in Set Info

To make sure that the Quick Search function considers your custom descriptions and comments, verify that the "Expansions" checkbox is turned on in the Quick Search section in the"Set Info" dialog window. But how do you know which search terms you should add to which items? We recommend to add search terms to items whenever a Quick Search did not yield the expected results. Just add your unsuccessful search terms to the description or a comment of the desired item. Over time, this helps Typinator to learn your search terms and makes Quick Search more and more powerful.