I’ve been collecting ChatGPT prompts for about a year now, and honestly, the difference between a mediocre prompt and a good one is night and day.
A few that have actually saved me time:
For email drafts: “Write a professional but warm email declining [request] while keeping the relationship intact. Keep it under 100 words.”
For meeting prep: “I’m meeting with [person/company] about [topic]. Give me 5 questions I should ask and 3 things I should know going in.”
For unsticking my brain: “I need to [task] but I’m not sure where to start. Walk me through it like I’m smart but overwhelmed.”
For summarizing long threads: “Summarize this email chain. What’s the actual decision that needs to be made, who needs to make it, and what are the open questions?”
That last one is probably my most-used. I paste in monster email threads and get clarity in seconds.
I keep all of these as TextExpander Snippets with fill-in fields, so I can fire them off without retyping. But I’m always looking for more.
What prompts do you use regularly? I’m especially curious about anything for writing, analysis, or just thinking through problems.
Is there a quick trick to surround a sentence with the optional section bubbles?
I mean, instead of having to click the optional section macro and then cut and paste the sentence in the middle?
it would be great if the sentence is already in the snippet editor canvas, highlight the entire sentence, then click “optional section” and it automatically suurrounds the sentence
If on a Mac, you could set up a Shortcut to run an AppleScript as a Quick Action from Services.
So the AppleScript would be…
on run {input, parameters}
if input is {} then return
set t to item 1 of input
set wrapped to “%fillpart:name=Optional:default=no%” & t & “%fillpartend%”
set the clipboard to wrapped
tell application “System Events”
keystroke “v” using {command down}
end tell
end run
Then, it’s a case of…
Highlight/select your optional text
Run the service
You’ll then have your selected text wrapped as per the below in your snippet…
You may then have to switch between one of the scripts and plain text Content Types a couple of times in Textexpander in order to get the UI “bubbles” to reappear.
Yes, I know it’s a bit clunky, but unfortunately, so is Textexpander’s UI, too.
As I say, it’s working fine for me. Only thing I can think of is you may be on a different version of macOS to me (Sequoia) and something has gone awry with that shared shortcut.
In an attempt to mitigate, you may want to just clear out the AppleScript, and copy in the below, afresh. Apart from that, I’m out of ideas I’m afraid. Perhaps try diagnostics with your LLM of choice instead of the back and fore between us.
on run {input, parameters} if input is {} then return set t to item 1 of input set wrapped to “%fillpart:name=Optional:default=no%” & t & “%fillpartend%” set the clipboard to wrapped tell application “System Events” keystroke “v” using {command down} end tell end run
These are so great - I don’t have any to share quite yet but am working on training so I am hoping to have some in the near future! I’ll come back and see if there are other responses and share what I end up using. Thanks, Josh!
This is your space to ask questions, find support, and share ideas with fellow TextExpander users and our product team. As a first step, take a moment to introduce yourself to the community.
