TextExpander issue in macOS?

What I did: I have a shortcut,

that lets me set a title with some fill-ins for doing a daily Work Journal entry.

What happened: Up until a few months ago, it worked fine. Starting a few months ago, Agenda changed so that if I take too long to fill in the popups, it forces an “Untitled” title in before the entry from TextExpander. More recently, the popups just do not show up anymore. I can hit return and get them without the fill-ins but it’s weird that the box isn’t even displaying any longer.

What I expected: The box to pop up, I can fill in the blanks, and it sets my title

Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc):

macOS Big Sur (latest), Agenda (latest), TextExpander (latest). MacBook Pro 16” 2020 edition.

We’ll have a look, but I can’t promise anything, ultimately TextExpander is a bit of a hack on top of the system and doesn’t allow us to control or detected any of its work. Just to be sure, I have nothing against TextExpander, I use it myself heavily, but just to give you an insight why it might not be solvable.

Ok, had a look, as I thought, there’s nothing we can do I’m afraid. What happens is that if you start typing the shortcut Agenda notices that you are changing the title and schedules an automatic save to happen in a few seconds. As no activity is detected (you are working inside a TextExpander window that we don’t have access to), the save happens and the field is reloaded. Not sure what TE does but it does somehow empty the field already, which means it revert to Untitled as we don’t allow for notes without titles.

One thing you could consider is to use the Template feature in Agenda, which allows you to prepare the content of a note for your Work Journal entry (it’s pretty much exactly the use case it was made for). You can already prepare the Date part of the title using text actions like \date as described here: Creating and Using Templates