Eliminate Repetive Stress Disorder with Fewer Keystrokes

Ok. Maybe not eliminate it completely. After all, we are not giving up iChat or Twitter so there will still be a bit too much typing in less than ergonomically correct positions (I love to type sitting on the couch). But you can at least limit the retyping of common phrases over and over and over…

That’s where TextExpander comes in. I have been using TextExpander for a couple of years now (back when it was Textpander) and have found it to be one of my consistently reliable and under-appreciated little tools. Juan wrote about it a year or so ago and if you have been following Mac productivity sites for any length of time you have probably heard the gist of what it does.

TextExpander takes programmed abbreviations and turns them into to plain text, formatted text, or picture snippets.

For instance. If I type "/sig" and I get my long email signature. One I just programmed in… "/tam" gets me The After Mac.

Now for some things you might not know, especially if you haven’t looked at TextExpander in a while.

CAPITALIZATION AND DELIMITATION

I use the / key to separate things like tam from tame. With my preferences set the way they are, if I used tam as my The After Mac shortcut, I would get a replacement every time I tried to type any word that starts with tam. But, I can set a delimiter and or case sensitive rules instead.

So instead of adding the slash, I could make my shortcut TAM. I probably wouldn’t type tame as TAME very often. But, I might type TAMPA now and then.

Another option is utilizing the delimiter. This is basically a character (or group of characters) that act as the execution directive. With this option enabled, TextExpander doesn’t go to work until you press the space key (for example). This means the only time tam would get expanded would be if it stood alone as its own word.

APPLICATION SPECIFIC

Another great feature of TextExpander (and one that I have got to set up soon), is application specific or application exclusive folders. You can create a folder of snippets that will only work in a particular program or that will specifically not work in a particular program.

The first thing I thought of was all the little IM type phrases people use: lol, rofl, brb. They work great in iChat, but if I am writing an email, I might want them to expand to their actual meaning. So a folder of snippets that excludes functionality in iChat would be just the trick. This means btw would stay btw in iChat, but would become By the way… in an email to my boss.

DATE/TIME

Another little thing that I use regularly is the insertion of date and time. It would automatically give you the current time and date in a variety of formats. I use /time for 10:53 AM. I use /date for Wednesday, May 28, 2008. These come in handy when writing a letter, email, or taking notes in a meeting.

I was the secretary on the board of a non-profit for a year and I would type /time at every full pause in my notes just to keep an eye on how long different points of conversation were taking.

The other time/date thing i do is /tdate. This gives me something like this. 05_28_08 105624. I use this when creating files that are going to be versioned and want a new name for each version. Instead of rough1.psd, rough2.psd, rough3.psd, etc… I get rough 05_28_08 105754.psd, rough 05_28_08 105819.psd, rough 05_28_08 105834.psd, etc… Much easier to tell which is first and I know instantly which was created when if I decided to go back to an older version.

AUTO CORRECT

Do you find yourself mistyping the same word regularly? I constantly type receive wrong. Word has that nifty auto correct built in, but the rest of my computer doesn’t. Until TextExpander. There are actually two snippet groups you can install that are preprogrammed with Auto Correct snippets or you can just create your own for that handful of phrases that you have problems with.

If you have not checked out TextExpander in a while, download the demo and give it a shot. The cost is $29.95 after the 30 day trial, but well worth it, imo (see… if I had set up my iChat snippets that would have expanded to in my opinion).

What great snippets do you have programmed or what great snippets would you program if you had a copy?