Faster Snippets: Adaptive Case Transformation

If you’ve been wondering how capitalization works with Faster Snippets, you’re about to find out.  Faster Snippets has adaptive case transformation built in, meaning that how we type the snippet will determine how the text is capitalized.

On any text action in Faster Snippets, we will see the Case Transformation icon to the left of the text field.  Clicking this icon will give us two options, Adaptive which is selected by default, or Exact.

Selecting Exact for this setting will type the text as it appears in the text action in the snippet editor, regardless of how the abbreviation is typed.  If our snippet is a full sentence or the capitalization in the text should not change, then we should use Exact to maintain casing.

Adaptive is different.  Depending on how we type the abbreviation, certain words may be capitalized.  There are three ways to type an abbreviation.

First, we can type an abbreviation in all lowercase letters.  If Adaptive Case is enabled, then the text will be typed in all lowercase letters regardless of how it appears in the text action.

This is common for simple snippets that we would use in the middle of sentences, like when the expanded text would be “with client”.  "With client" would almost never be capitalized, so we would type the abbreviation in all lowercase letters.

We can also capitalize the first letter of the abbreviation.  In this case, the first letter of the expanded text would be capitalized as well.

This is common in snippets that would usually start a sentence, like “Attended meeting” or “Telephonic conference”.  Since we’re starting a new sentence, we capitalize the first letter of the abbreviation to have that case of the expanded text match.

And finally, we can type the abbreviation in all capital letters to capitalize the first letter of every word in the expanded text.

This is common with acronyms where we would prefer to type the full text instead of the acronym.  An example would be creating USCIS as an abbreviation to expand into "United States Citizenship and Immigration Services".  Since the abbreviation is the acronym, and the acronym should be typed in all capital letters, the first letter of each word will be capitalized.

Remember that there is always more than one way to do something.  In all of the examples we just talked about, we could just as easily configure a snippet with exact casing and type the intended text into the text action the way it should be expanded.  Adaptive case is designed to help with snippets where the abbreviation could be situationally typed either way.