Most of us who use the computer for anything from work to just emailing, tend to type certain phrases over and over. And if you like to do things the easy way, like I do, then Texter is a fantastic tool to help you with this. You can setup Texter to type out any phrase you want by basically setting up your own hotkeys. It stays in your Windows system tray to save you lots of trouble whenever you want.
Setting up a new “hotstring” is easy. Just press the little Plus Sign then put the string of characters you want to use as your shortcut in the hotstring area, then enter the text you want to use to replace that string and the trigger for that string. Now, the trigger part is very important. You have a choice of triggers: Enter, Space, Tab, or Instant. Instant means that that string will instantly be replaced with the text you’ve set up for it. This is where you have to be careful because unless you have some bizarre string of characters set up, you could accidentally replace a simple word with a big, long phrase (my friend Trudy has a funny story about doing just that, although, not with Texter, and I’ll ask her to drop by and fill you in on the details, so check the comments).
I have a hotstring set up to replace tr+Tab with “techreluctant.com”. There, I just did it and saved my poor fingers all that work. Texter also comes with a universal spelling auto-correct which is enabled by default (you can turn it off by going to Tools–>Preferences) and is even set up to make a sound when it replaces text or does a spelling auto-correct (which you can turn off the same way). I know it might be hard to understand all this as it’s written so check out the short video of Texter above and for more details and ideas of what to do with it, the longer video below.
April 24th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Ahhh yes … my “search and replace” story. Well first you have to know that I write Biblical historical fiction. So I had to include, because his name was a matter of record, a character named “Epaphroditus” in a story I was writing. It was tiresome and tedious to type, and Tina point out that I could just give him a nickname, like “Epap” and then later do a search and replace to put the full name in.
So I did. But I did it as I went along, updating every few chapters, instead of waiting till it was all complete. Not realizing that every time I changed it, the word “Epap” was still a part of the word “Epaphroditus,” and Word was continuing to go back and change it every time. By the time I was finished, I went back and reread the first few chapters, and the character’s name was “Epaphroditusrhoditusrhoditusrhoditus.” So, that was fun to fix.
Gee Tina, I hope that’s the story you were thinking of …
April 24th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
It is indeed. I still find this so funny. Thanks for it.