I’m always intrigued by utilities like this, and there’s never a shortage of them for whatever my environment of choice might be at any moment. But I do find they lock me in, and they’re not portable, and you just get too darned used to them. As a PC tech dude, whether I’m working corporate or freelancing as now, I’m forever wanting to use a shortcut or utility when I’m at a client’s machine, and it ain’t there. Much as I like playing with these toys, I tend not to miss them all that much when I’m starting over fresh.

(Similarly, I’m one of those obviously-fooling-himself guys who thinks he can type faster with a Dvorak keyboard. Although it isn’t as much effort as I expected to switch layouts, the amount of time I spend on Qwerty machines forces me to stick with the standard.)

And when you talk about 1000+ abbreviations, my mind boggles. That almost seems the opposite of the GTD philosophy, to needle you a bit. It’s 1000 more things you have to keep in memory, no matter how buried in reflex they get (and the more buried in reflex, the more frustrating and slowing when you don’t have them at hand).

Now, I do customize my environment, particularly with command line aliases, so I can’t claim purity on this point — but I do find after a certain point my own aliases become unmanageable, and with ones that are mainly to save me from typing woefully complicated lists of switches or some such, but infrequently actually used, I would end up having to double-check the syntax that I devised when I used them! I suspect the same would happen if I overdosed on a utility like this.

I just noticed (last Friday) that Firefox switched Ctrl-Y to be the Redo command (formerly it opened the Download Manager window). Lots to be said for not having to remember what works in what context.

I’ll leave off here for fear of dragging the thread into discussions of keyboards and security practices …