Convert Time with a TextExpander Snippet

I find I am using TextExpander more and more these days. It’s an awesome productivity tool that saves me time by inserting snippets of text into whatever I’m writing, be it code or words. What I didn’t know about TextExpander, that is, until today, is that it can run shell scripts to generate the text snippets.

I often meet with people on the West Coast. When I schedule a meeting time, I will say something like “Let’s meet at 01:30 PM EDT / 10:30 AM PDT” in the email. Not only is this a lot of text to type, but it also requires I calculate the Pacific time.

How cool would it be if TextExpander could generate the time snippet for me? Guess what. It can.

I created a shell script snippet that takes a local time, which I input, and calculates the Eastern and Pacific times. I use timept;; for the snippet abbreviation. Now when I want to mention a particular time in an email, I type timept;; and enter the time. TextExpander does the rest.

Here’s the shell script code for anyone who might want it. Make sure you select Shell Script as the Content type when creating the snippet.

#! /bin/bash

# Enter a time using 24H. 1:30pm is 13:30 .

ENTERTIME="%filltext:name=Time (in 24H)%"

# See https://gist.github.com/palaniraja/f8e21e8c66eac7e1b313 for a
# list of time zone names.

T1=$(TZ="America/New_York" date -jf "%H:%M %z" "$ENTERTIME $(date "+%z")" "+%I:%M %p %Z")

T2=$(TZ="America/Los_Angeles" date -jf "%H:%M %z" "$ENTERTIME $(date "+%z")" "+%I:%M %p %Z")

echo -n "$T1 / $T2"

Posted in programming. Tagged in micropost, textexpander.

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