Many moons ago I installed a keyboard app on my phone that lets me set my own custom shortcuts for stuff I type a lot, like my email addy or phrases I use a lot etc. So for example instead of typing out my whole email addy I can just type "em1" and it automatically becomes my full email addy. I miss this convenience terribly when I am using the computer. A couple of nights ago, while searching for something else, I stumbled on an app for the computer that does this. It's called "FastFox" and I am loving it.
There is no limit on the length of the text your shortcut can expand to, and you can do "rich text" too which you can format for color, size, italics, bold, underline and strike-through.
This is my example of rich text
which I inserted here simply by typing rt - the shortcut I assigned to this sample string.
You can also make a shortcut for inserting an image instead of text, like this
where I just typed 'tu1' instead of searching around my computer for the image and using the camera icon to insert it in the post.
You can set macros, too, which I haven't messed with because frankly, I have never really understood macros.
It's a simple user-friendly interface with some bells & whistles but the basic simple-text shortcuts are insanely useful:
- You can make them for links you use all the time, like for your store or website.
- You can make one just for your RF# so you can quickly add it to any link, or for adding a tracking code to the link, or for both ...
- You can use it for code snippets you use all the time, like this one for example
<a href="URL" target="_blank">TEXT HERE</a>
where i just typed 'aref' to get the above.
- You can use it for your standard responses to customer chat inquiries instead of copying/pasting the same reply over and over.
- you could use it for tag sets, titles, descriptions etc
Since you can make the shortcut combo anything you want and there's no limit on the length of the text it triggers, there's no limit to the time-saving uses for this.
* I downloaded and am using the free version. There is a paid version but I scoured their website and can't find anything saying what the difference is. So far I haven't had any ads in it, no prompts to buy it, no grayed-out functions, no notices that it's a trial that will end after a certain time frame... I feel like there's got to be some catch to using the free version but I haven't figured out what it is yet if there is one.
After discovering this type of thing exists I went looking for other "text expanders" that might be more clear about free/trial versions and found FastKeys. FastKeys says the only "catch" with their free version is that you will occasionally get 'friendly pop-up messages'. FastKeys seems to do all the same things FastFox can and more (except maybe making a shortcut for an image) but I found it a little more daunting to figure out so haven't spent much time on it.
Anyways, whether its FastFox or FastKeys or another one you've Googled up, get yourself a "text-expander" and watch your productivity soar when you don't have to spend so much time on typing out or copying&pasting frequently used text.
