ITauthor

I love keyboard shortcuts. Each little shortcut saves you a few seconds and over a year that's a lot less time spent clicking around, choosing from menus and more time being productive. It's all about getting on with the stuff you want to be getting on with, and spending less time/effort just getting there.

So here's a good one. Texter is a little application written by someone at LifeHacker. When you run it it sits in your system tray and replaces predefined sets of characters with longer text. So if you type the same thing several times a day, you can type a few characters and it's automatically replaced by your name as you type. For example, to type Alistair Christie I could just type ac, hit the Enter key and ac is replaced by my name.

If you're a coder you'll probably find this particularly useful as it lets you enter big chunks of code with just a few key presses.

Download Texter from the Download link on the Texter home page.

Important

• Go to the Preferences and turn off Enable Universal Spelling AutoCorrect. It's clearly supposed to work on whole words to correct spelling, but unfortunately it corrects before you've finished writing a word. For example, if you try to write agree, as soon as you get as far as agre it changes the word to agree, which means you end up with agreee. Similarly, if you try to write another you get aanother. This maybe works on some platforms, but on my Vista laptop it's obviously broken. But no matter, Texter is fine without this.
• Replacements don't work everywhere. For example, they don't work in the Run dialog box. From what I've read, this used to work in XP, but doesn't in Vista. Shame, because it would be useful to be able to run a program by just typing a few characters in any application.