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You know that feeling when you’re about to type your address for the 47th time this week?

Or when you need to send “Thanks for reaching out! I’ll get back to you within 24 hours.” to yet another customer email?

Or when you’re writing code and you need console.log('debugging here'); again?

Or when you’re pasting the same AI prompt into ChatGPT or Claude for the tenth time today?

I do too. And I finally snapped.

A friend and I built Retext.

What it does

Retext is a macOS app that expands short triggers into full phrases as you type.

You create a snippet like ;addr → “1234 Oak Street, San Francisco, CA 94102”

Then anywhere on your Mac — email, Slack, VS Code, browser, anywhere — you type ;addr and it instantly replaces with your full address.

No popup. No clicking. No breaking your flow. Just type and go.

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Perfect for AI power users

If you’re using AI tools daily, you probably have prompts you reuse constantly:

;summarize → “Summarize this in 3 bullet points, focusing on actionable takeaways”

;rewrite → “Rewrite this to be more concise and direct. Keep the same meaning but cut the fluff.”

;code-review → “Review this code for bugs, performance issues, and best practices. Be specific.”

Instead of hunting through your notes or retyping from memory, just type ;summarize and go.

Why I built it

The existing text expansion tools felt either:

1. Overly complex (I just want to save some text, not set up a database)
2. Abandoned (looking at you, TextExpander alternatives from 2015)
3. Expensive for what they do

So I built something simple. Something that does one thing well. Something native to macOS.

The cool part: AI snippets

Here’s where it gets interesting. Retext has AI built in.

You can ask it to generate snippet content for you. “Write a polite decline for a meeting request” or “Create a professional email signature for a marketing consultant.”

It writes the snippet, you save it, done.

Pricing

Free: 3 snippets. Forever free. No account required.

Pro: $19/mo or $99/year. Unlimited snippets + AI generation.

No subscriptions to unlock basic functionality. The free tier actually works.

Works on macOS 15+. Download, grant Accessibility permission, start expanding.

If you try it, reply and let me know what snippets you create. I’m always curious what people automate first.

Let me know what you think!

—Corey

*PS: The trigger character is semicolon (;) because it’s easy to type and you almost never start a word with it.