General: What text editors and other tools do you like for AE expressions?

[Dan Ebberts]

Almost always Notepad. 🙂

Dan

[Miguel De mendoza]

I think the best is Notepad ++, it’s free and recongnizes allmost all languages. But I usualy work with layer panel (it is a matter of getting used) or in Extendscript Toolkit.

[Jakob Wagner]

The expressionist looks great, but I havn’t tried it yet. For longer expressions and scripts, I always use sublime text. It works really great with almost any kind of script.

[Phil Aupperle]

Now that I’ve had a day to bang on Expressionist pretty hard, I’d say it’s going to be a major tool for me from now on. The ability to grab expressions out of properties, and then blast them back onto multiple layers simultaneously without copy-pasting is awesome. This means you can actually keep the ram preview going while you tweak an expression, reapply it to multiple layers, and see the results immediately. I still think it’s a good idea to have another text editor open so you can keep variations, save text files, etc., but for AE productivity the extension is huge. Also, the ability to catch open perens and brackets without my eyes going googly is a big bonus. 😉

[Stephen Dixon]

I’ve developed a technique where you can use text layers as expression editors. This has a couple of advantages: you can use one text layer to drive multiple layers and properties meaning that you only have to update the expression on all the layers. Also it updates as you type which is frankly awesome, and lastly you can see the expression in the comp window if you want, in whatever font you like with optical kerning and everything.

The biggest down-side of this technique is that you don’t have access to the pick-whip and the expressions drop down. If you’re a newb expressions writer then this is probably not for you, but for simple expressions that you want to apply to hundreds of layers it really is the bomb.

Basically it invoves using the javascript eval() function, that is sometimes used to drive expressions from external files. But there’s a trick to getting it to read text layers – you need to use the value property of a property. Full details on how to do it here: https://blob.pureandapplied.com.au/using-text-layers-as-expressions-in-after-effects/

exp = thisComp.layer("expressionSource").text.sourceText.value;
eval(exp)

Stephen Dixon
Editor, Animator, Motionographer
Museum Victoria

[Phil Aupperle]

That. Is. Awesome.

That unlocks a huge amount of potential. Can’t wait to start testing this!

[Santi Agustí]

oh Stephen, glad to see that! since forever I’m using a very simmilar snippet to store the most common expressions I use (like different kinds of bounces, or some extended wiggles, etc), but referenced to an external comp called “scripts”
I use this variation, but is the same:

eval(comp("scripts").layer("bounce01").text.sourceText.toString());