How to auto-replace text *anywhere* in Windows

By | March 11, 2016

Ok I’ll admit it, I’m a huge fan of the “Shrug Emoji” (aka ¯_(ツ)_/¯) but do you know how annoying it is to try and type it out or search for it, copy, paste, whenever I want to use it?

Enter PhraseExpress.

I found after reading this article on TheAtlantic for the 4,000th time after searching for how to type out the shrug emoji. Unfortunately, the article is very non-Windows-centric. It links to a piece of software called “Auspex” but that link is dead. So I searched Bing for “Auspex” and PhraseExpress was the first result. It’s exactly what we need!

For your convenience, and the proliferation of a great piece of software, I have uploaded both the Install and Portable variants of the latest version of PhraseExpress to Chocolatey. Just:

choco install phraseexpress.install

or

choco install phraseexpress.portable

and you’ll be off and running!

Once you have PhraseExpress installed, run it and go to File | Import and import the attached definition to enable ¯_(ツ)_/¯ whenever you type ‘shruggie’ ANYWHERE in Windows! (You can change this auto text after you import if you prefer something else)

Enjoy!

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