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Text expander and clipboard enhancer tools
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Posted by 22111
Oct 16, 2013 at 02:27 PM
Except for drop-down lists to choose from (which I never got accustomed to, in text expansion tools, but of which I understand the utility if you are willing to fiddle with them), the only “problem” with AHK is the lacking speed of “changing things”, which for text expansion interferes very often. So for using AHK for this, you should do a little macro in the way of:
control-something opens the respective terms list
there, you enter the new term, or change some existing term
escape will close the list and save it “over” the existing one (“reload this script”)
These some lines would give you access to your AHK text expansion list as easy as in any (good) commercial tool, AND you will be able to have several such lists, for several such uses, both alternatively or even concurrently.
But I think it’s interesting to hear that Bartels doesn’t seem to be too eager to eliminate bugs, since his program is one of the most expensive ones on the market? He just answers questions from paying users, which I understand (even if it’s rare for a developer to impose such a condition), but I had thought that bug reports from those paying users were properly processed?
Posted by 22111
Oct 16, 2013 at 02:51 PM
Interesting examples there, with
comp
-etition
-arative
-etitor
etc., since I’m almost certain that almost everybody, with such examples in a drop-down list, will make my experience with such: That selecting and triggering the right entry there takes both more time and more effort than just typing the needed 5 or 6 characters of the intended word. Of course, dictation is the best text expander in the end, and most often-used words are short, and often rather similar, e.g. der, die, das, which you could perhaps abbreviate d, e, a, or “i” for “is”, in English, t for the, th for there, ts for this, tss for these, wr for were, ws for was, and so on, but you will quickly find that there ain’t so many possibilities, with very short abbreviations, for such words.
But in your work, there will be special, recurring words, and here, it’s important to really abbreviate them: If you need them very often, you should do it by real short abbreviations; if it’s variants, you should have standardized “second parts” of your abbreviations, which could facilitate your memorizing compound words, and why not, competi,n could be competition, and satisfac-n could be satisfaction, such “-n” being “tion”, similar for other endings. Btw, AHK helps a lot here, since you can put your abbreviations into different groups where different end/expension trigger characters will apply; only few commercial tools offer this flexibility.
In the end, you’ll see that you will have rather few abbreviated standard terms, which really help you in typing faster, but too much fiddling with text expansion is counter-productive, just typing often being faster.
Posted by Franz Grieser
Oct 16, 2013 at 02:54 PM
>But I think it’s interesting to hear that Bartels doesn’t seem to be too
>eager to eliminate bugs, since his program is one of the most expensive
>ones on the market? He just answers questions from paying users, which I
>understand (even if it’s rare for a developer to impose such a
>condition), but I had thought that bug reports from those paying users
>were properly processed?
When I talked to Gunnar Bartels about some problems he pointed me to the right solution.
But the problems I had before I stopped using PE where a) not reproduceable and b) extremely complicated to explain (and one of my jobs is explaining how to use software). So, when I had to reinstall Windows and my applications on my PC, I decided not to install PE again. I do miss some of PE’s features but not enough ...
Franz
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 21, 2013 at 05:59 PM
I’m still working up to my PhraseExpander review but I just wanted to point out that the latest version (3.9.6) released today has a new algorithm which optimises its “SmartComplete” feature (drop-down selection box at the cursor) for two types of users:
1) those who want to keep typing and keep narrowing down the list that way, until the desired word is at the top (and then use the confirmation key), through perfect (as opposed to fuzzy) front-end matching of letters;
2) or those who want to type a couple of letters, and then type the last (or any other) letter of the word already showing up somewhere in the list, to make the desired word jump to the top of the list.
E.g. I can type “con” and the list “concept, conception, conceptual, conceptually” shows up in a drop-down box. Now I could use the arrow key to go to “conceptual”, or click on it with the mouse.
But with option 2, I could also type “conl” (first 3 + last letter of “conceptual”, and that word jumps to the top of the list, and then I just hit the confirmation key (Tab key for me).
This solves the only problem I’ve had with PhraseExpander so far (otherwise it’s been working great): it didn’t have perfect front-end matching, as the fuzzy matching tried to guess the whole word on the basis of the first few letters typed, and displayed not so relevant matches (e.g. typing “con” would bring up “competition” at the top of the list), as the software was geared towards users who memorise shortcuts.
But this new feature now relieves me of the cognitive burden of having to remember hundreds of shortcuts (or having to keep typing more letters for better matches). I have 536 phrases in my main glossary and there is no way I’d want to memorise that many shortcuts…
Of course it’s still possible to use the memorised shortcuts method as well, so I guess that would be the 3rd type of user.
Posted by jimspoon
Oct 21, 2013 at 06:22 PM
just looked at the webpage, $55.95 is pretty steep!
Your description gave me an idea; perhaps it has already been implemented by somebody.
A utility could monitor text that is input, and record commonly used phrases into a database. (No need to manually create a database of autotexts and abbreviations).
Then, while typing, when you want to insert any one of those commonly used phrases - you might type in a keystroke that signals the utility “i want to insert one of my commonly used phrases. use the following keystrokes to find that phrase for me.” I often use the forward slash “/” for that purpose.
Now just start typing parts of that phrase - with spaces to signify an AND condition. A popup list would show all commonly used phrases that match the entered query. Just for example - suppose you wanted to enter the commonly used phrase “big mac with fries”, this would come up as an option if you typed in “bi fr ac”.
I find files in just this way using Voidtools Everything - searching for strings that appear in the filename.