It turns out that TextExpander and Typinator set a minimum of two letters for an abbreviation. For some reason my one-letter abbreviations were not working. It was gratifying to hear the little beeps as I typed, knowing that I was saving keystrokes each time the sound played.īut my troubles were not over. As I encountered a new word that I use a lot, I would add a snippet if there was not one already. I started using the program while doing emails and blogging. You can decide on a "snippet" by snippet basis whether to type the delimiter and how to treat upper case. The program installs itself as a System Preferences pane and has a nice interface with some advanced features. The text expansion programs would not accept Unicode, so I had to resave the file.Īfter all this conversion I finally had my abbreviations loaded into TextExpander. Unfortunately, after all of this I still had a problem with the encoding of the text. I didn't want to retype all of that (though it probably would have been faster in the long run), so I found a simple Java program that read in a comma delimited file and wrote it out differently and modified it to fit my needs. Next, however, I discovered that the order I had put the abbreviation and expanded text were reversed. I had to search and replace all my commas with tabs, but not too big of a deal. First of all, the programs would accept tab-delimited but not comma-delimited text. Unbeknownst to me, there were several problems with this. For very common and short words I used one-letter abbreviations ("t" for "the", "n" for "and", etc.) If a word was only one letter (like "I") or not easily abbreviated (like "in"), I deleted it from the list. The programs all had options for importing text files, so I started typing abbreviations after each word, with a comma in between. I had a text file of Fry's List with one word per line. Of course that is where the trouble started. I figured that would be a good starting place for my abbreviations. One of the popular lists of words by frequency is Fry's First 100, named for its creator, Edward Fry. According to teacher school, if you take the 100 most common words in the English language, you can read (or write) 50% of all elementary text. I wanted to use very short abbreviations for very common, but sometimes also very short, words. The product pages for each program tend to emphasize the use of abbreviations for larger snippets of repetitive text like form letters. It may sound complicated, but it's really not. Then it copies the expansion and the period onto the clipboard and pastes it into place, effectively replacing the "ty." with "thank you.". When I start a new word with "ty" (typing it right after a space or other delimiter) and then type, say, a period, the text expansion program backspaces three times, deleting the delimiter and the "ty".
To give you an example, I have "ty" defined as a shortcut for "thank you". If there is a match, they backspace over what you have just typed, copy the expansion onto the clipboard, and paste its contents. When you type a space, punctuation, or other defined key, the programs compare the keyboard buffer to the list of abbreviations you have defined. They run in the background watching your keystrokes. All are available as free trials with full licenses costing 19.95 Euros, $27, and $29.95, respectively.Īll three programs work the same way. I found three programs that work as text expanders for OS X, Typinator, TypeIt4Me, and TextExpander. That can't be too hard, right? Guess again. Since that is far too rich for my blood, I decided to set up a system of abbreviations myself. As a special education teacher I had worked with the application Co:Writer by Don Johnston software, which does a fine job of text prediction as letters and sentences are typed. My most recent endeavor was based on the idea of using text expansion to minimize the number of keystrokes I have to enter. Rather than fighting with the computer just to get the proper tools in place, I could actually get things done.įor reasons I'll go into some other time I have been searching for quite a while for ways to speed up my text input. That's one reason why I found OS X so compelling when I first started using it for the most part things just worked. Perhaps nothing is more irritating than trying to set up some time-saving software, having problems, and wasting lots of time resolving them.
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