Good news!

The best thing about running a beta release is that you get to hear from users early and can react and implement features and quality of life improvements quickly. That’s what happened this week.

There was almost unanimous appeal for the ability to customize the snippet prefix. ShortCode launched with it fixed to “$” but as noted, typing that involved an extra keystroke that added unnecessary friction to a users flow. So this week I worked hard to address this issue. And I’m happy to report that in the latest update you can now navigate to Settings and set the prefix to (almost) any character you like.

To download the latest version of ShortCode please go to Settings → Check for Updates.

The Caveat

With updates like this, which structurally alter the underlying codebase significantly, there is a bit of pain involved. Thankfully on your end the fix only needs to be done once - and then you won’t have to worry about it again. If you’ve created snippets that contain nested snippets or use the math or list functions there is a small fix you need to do for them to “pickup” the prefix change.

1. Go to Settings and change your prefix to your desired character.

2. Go into any snippets you’ve made and manually swap the “$” or “_” to the prefix you chose. Then save.

3. Do that for each of your snippets and then you are done!
   
   I would have loved to be able to program ShortCode to fix this itself but alas that would have take far too long and been almost impossible to implement consistently across many users computers.

LIST OF UPDATES IN THIS RELEASE

Note - I’m using the $ prefix in the examples below but if you customize yours then the prefix will be what you chose.

1. Customizable Prefixes

2. Math and List function now use the standard prefix. Not “_”

3. Math and List functions can now accept spaces inside the brackets [ ].

4. Math can now accept snippets if they are numeric. For example I can create a snippet $taxrate and set it equal to 1.13 (13%). If I want to output the value of a figure plus the tax rate I can write this: $math[56.17 * $taxrate]

5. Currency helper. If you know the international currency code you want to appear in front of a value but don’t know how to type it, you can summon it with prefix followed by the currency code. Eg: $gbp9.99 = £9.99. You can even do math if you add brackets eg: $gbp[10.99 × 3.7]

As always, thanks for participating in the ShortCode Beta. Your input is invaluable. If you have feedback or notes please join me over on the ShortCode Discord channel : https://discord.gg/mP7FuRNU

or you can email feedback directly to beta@shortcode.app

Many Thanks,
Ian
–
ShortCode.app