Apologies for going a little nuts with posts over the long weekend. I just discovered the TextExpander Community and have six years’ worth of material fighting its way out of my brain.
There are many snippets that I work with as collections of snippet groups. For example, I have individual snippet groups for the whole alphabet with various accent marks applied. If I want to type a Latin character with a caron, there’s a snippet for that. Same character with a breve below it, there’s a snippet for that, too. This generates a lot of snippets, and I find it better to organize them into individual groups:
(That’s just the first part of the list.)
I’d love it if TextExpander had some sort of conceptual grouping for what I call “collections” — my feature wish list — but since it doesn’t, I’ve taken to naming my snippet groups with colons to keep them together as “supergroups” of a sort.
Does anyone else do this? If so, what collections do you have? Any tips or recommendations for organizing and working with them?
For example, I’m fleshing out my emoji groups, which has me considering replacing the prefixes in the titles (Diacritics:, Brands:, URLs:, etc.) with emoji, just to save some space.
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Hi @Secret-HQ ,
No apologies needed! Six years of ideas finally getting out is a great problem for the Community to have!
The colon naming trick is a solid workaround, and you’re not the only one doing it. Two things that might make those collections work even harder for you:
- Set a group prefix on each collection. Any snippet in that group picks it up automatically, so your “Diacritics:” group could carry something like
d. and the naming convention you see in the list matches what you actually type. It also keeps collections from colliding with each other on abbreviations.
- Lean on inline search (Command + / on Mac) when a collection gets deep. It saves you from memorizing every abbreviation, which is the usual pain point once a library hits this size.
On swapping the text prefixes for emoji, that should work fine. Emoji still cluster together in the group list the way your colon prefixes do, so you keep the supergroup effect and reclaim the space. The only thing I’d watch is picking emoji distinct enough to tell apart at a glance once the list is long, since 
and 
start to blur. For the collections where no emoji reads clearly, a short text prefix could still be the safer bet.
Finally. I’ve got the grouping wish taken down for the team! Requests for a real layer above groups do come up, so it’s good to have yours on the name of lists. If you can connect us to your email via support@textexpander.com just link this thread in the email and I’ll make sure you’re on the list to be notified if this becomes a reality 
Curious what other collections people have built. Anyone else naming groups this way?
All the best,
