http://www.typeit4me.com I have been using Typeit4me for years. It’s been very helpful. How does this compare to Typeit4me?

Mark Hurst reviewed Typeit4me back in the day, and I recall being very into it for a while, but eventually souring on the Carbon-ness of it. YMMV: a lot of people still swear by it.

I really like the drop-dead simplicity and Cocoa-ness of Textpander. It was very fast to set up.

Also, FWIW, you can apparently refer to/recycle all your current TI4M commands if you want to give Textpander a sample spin (see prefs).

I heart Peter Maurer. He also made Witch, a window switcher that owns OS X’s window switcher. It’s kinda like Quicksilver, as you might find yourself sayin’, “This should be built into OS X.”

So I really like the idea behind this app…but now i can’t think of anything to abbreviate! Dangit!

Peter Maurer is great! I second the recommendation for “Witch”, and I still use the old CalendarClock, and wish Peter was still working on it. now, on to try Textpander…

I’m using Textpander to create footnotes on my weblog entries.

Hey, great app! I was wondering if one could create a handy automator action or AppleScript that allows one to add an abbrev on the fly — I’ve gotten used to quick abbrev definitions in Emacs, but it would be great to have something similar in Cocoa apps.

I use SpellCatcher X for this.

cheers, nickel

I’m glad to see this. Once you get into shortcuts, you will start shortcutting everything, from dates (Saturday, September 17, 2005 at 4:20 PM, Colorado Time was just typed by hitting Command-9) to 5-line addresses, to entire 400-word boilerplate email responses, to the entire URLs of your favorite sites (especially the ones buried deep in 5 subdirectories). You would never remember them, but with a shortcut like forum.com, your specific forum’s site comes up in under a second. Have a European phone number you can never remember? Just create a short cut, ElizPhone, and her entire 17-digit number appears anywhere you can place a cursor.

Like Hannu, I’ve used SpellCatcher since the late 90s. I’ve always thought it was an unfortunate name; while it does have a killer system-wide spell checker and alternative word window (see http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/sequoia1234/spellcatcher.png for an example of its drop down window that appears—you hit the corresponding number to replace the misspelled word), it’s main strength is its ability to create thousands of shortcuts.

It’s third feature, just so you know, is its “GhostWriter”, which tracks every single keystroke you type, and then categorizes them by application into a text file. While many don’t turn this on, for the (valid) fear of exposure, I love it. I’ve written long letters on Safari, and then had it crash. Or thought I sent an email, or overwritten something important in InDesign. Now, no problem: I open up that day’s file of ghostwriter, and all the text is there.

I’m mentioning all this not to take away from what sounds like a very cool freeware app that does what SpellCatcher does. I’m verifying how instrumental shortcutting can become once you install one of these utilities. I could give 400 examples of where I use short cuts throughout my writing day. Get it and try it!

Scott

This is possible in any decent texteditor (Vim).

Hell, even MS Word does it.

Why is this worthy of an article?