Text Substitution
I’ve heard about programs that take a keyword and expand that word into a whole sentence or paragraph, but I can’t remember the name of them. Any ideas?
These programs are text substitution applications. You set up a word or short phrase, and when you type that word/phrase, the application will expand it into a longer sentence or paragraph. This is perfect for people who wind up typing some of the same things over and over.
I use TextExpander on the Mac. It’s simple, easy to setup and works flawlessly. It’s free to try and $29.95 for the license. It’s been well worth it!
ActiveWords is my favorite Windows application. It’s $49.95, with a 60 day trial. It works on Vista and XP. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to setup as TextExpander. It’s a tad more labor intensive, but it does have some cool features. The application automatically calculates how many hours and money you’ve saved by using it. Could be fun to keep track! ActiveWords has additional functionality by adding the option to open applications just by typing a word (most likely the name of the app) and hitting F8 or another hotkey.
Texter is free and works with both Vista and XP. It’s more comparable to TextExpander on the Mac, and is less complicated than ActiveWords. I know some people have been successful with it, but I haven’t had much luck.
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I didn’t want to put this in the post because I haven’t tried it, but Vim is free for XP users.
http://www.vim.org
Thanks for the “ink”
Here is one simple tweak that will help a lot: once you install ActiveWords.
Right click on the ActiveWords monitor, go to options, go to confirmation options, and then enable the spacebar/spacebar box at the top 1/3 of screen.
This way you don’t have to reach for the F8 key, and can just use the space bar to trigger ActiveWords.
And we do a lot more than the others. Look at our various agents, e.g. http://www.activewords.com/plusapplications.html and I have collected a bunch of stuff related to our scripting language:
http://buzzmodo.typepad.com/buzznovation/2006/03/activewords_and_3.html
Buzz