Great Uses for Text Substitution
Posted Sunday, February 17th, 2008 3:29 am by Dave Moyer
Text substitution is one of the most time-saving concepts on a computer, period. Take any bit of text, short or long, and set a keyword for use. Whenever and wherever you type the keyword, you’ll instantly get your text! Some program options for PC users include the simple yet powerful Texter from Lifehacker (free), or the much more complicated AutoHotKey (free). I tend to prefer Texter just because of its’ simple functionality, portability, and speed.
Mac users have my personal favorite, Textexpander ($29.95, Smileonmymac.com, 30 day trial available. If you find any other Mac programs out there, let me know!)
Here are some of my favorite ways to use text substitution:
- Address and Contact Info - Use substitution to speed up registrations, etc. I have a ’saddr’ snippet for my street address, ‘nnum’ for my phone, ‘ccity’, and even ‘zzip’. You’d be surprised how much this speeds things up!
- Date and Time - Quick date/time stamps are a great use for substitution. Textexpander and Texter both have date functions built in.
- Date and Time - By default, these are built into Textpander. ‘ddate’ and ‘ttime’ will insert ‘Monday; March 6, 2006′, and ‘9:34 PM’, respectively.
- Code - I have all sorts of snippets to automatically close HTML tags, PHP scripts, etc. For example, if I type ‘<b>’, I get ‘<b></b>’ with my cursor placed within the tags. Also helpful for SQL statements, HTML symbols or CSS properties.
- Personalized Auto-correct - I constantly type ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’. I’m sure you have your recurring typos as well, and here’s the solution! Lots of apps have spell-check features, but they generally correct things I don’t want them to correct. Perhaps I just like the control…
- Email replies - I have a Texter script set up to turn ‘Name tfe’ to ‘Thanks for your email, Name!’ Make your own scripts for the “form mail” replies you find yourself writing all the time.
- Email signatures - Need I say more?
- Long words - Also very obvious. I’ve got ’ssub’ setup to say ’substitution’ just because I found I was typing it quite a bit. Make snippets based on what you need.
- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet… - This is especially helpful to designers and developers who need filler text often. I have a couple paragraphs set under ‘lipsum’.
- Everything else - Whatever you find yourself typing often, add it into your library of substitutions.
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