TextExpander: organize abbreviations by context
Posted by JeanTimothy in Ohio sent us this detailed tip showing how he organizes his abbreviations into contexts:
I find that using different beginning delimiters for different contexts helps me to remember which ones they are.
1) For HTML shortcuts, I start with “<". For example:
<3 = <h3>%|</h3>
<i = <img xsrc="%|" mce_src="%|" alt="" width="x" height="y" />
<xstrict = XHTML Strict DocType and <head> stuff (see below)
<bq = blockquote2) For IRC (administrative commands), I start with "i" such as ikick or iban to fill in a kick or ban syntax, or /login to fill in the login stuff
3) For chat shortcuts I start with "!", eg. !yw (you're welcome) or !ty (Thank you!) or !bbin (I'll be be back in %| minutes)
4) Email I start with "/" or "@" (I don't know why):
/sig for my signature, /wsig for my work signature
/add is my mailing address
/phone fills in all my phone numbers:
work
home
cellin that order because if I put my number in something I may want to give all my numbers, but I might not. If I want to just do 2, I use /phone and then just do shift + up-arrow to highlight and delete the cell, etc
/yiwbt = Yes I will be there (I get a lot of "Can you come to the meeting?" or "Will you be at the meeting?", etc).
Then I also have some of what I like to call "recursive" shortcuts which involve two shortcuts:
1) I have shortcuts for each day of the week @mon @tue @wed etc which expand to "Monday at "
2) I have another shortcut @remind: "Just a reminder we will be
meeting " and then I add @mon or @tue and then add the time tooI prefer the phone to email, but sometimes you need to email someone and ask them to call you back when it's convenient for them, so I have some shortcuts for that too:
@church = "Give me a call at the church when you get a chance - 740-446-1030"
Similar for @cell and @homeAnd then of course there are the dang typos that I make and now get autocorrected not just in word processing apps, but all apps:
nad = and
teh = the
god = God
And there are times that I want to have the real fractions rather than just 1/2 or 3/4. I could make a shortcut of "1/2" but then I can't type a literal "1/2" so what to do?
I use two // instead of 1, for example: I use a shortcut of 1//2 for ½
I think those are all my tips!
Oh here is <xstrict expanded (yeah I write HTML by hand, sick, I know)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>%|</title><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body></body>
</html>
Thanks, Timothy, for the good ideas.
September 5th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Nice! I like how you explained your reasoning behind your tips, which is inspiring me to do some similar things.
September 6th, 2006 at 4:46 am
[…] Also, TextExpander’s developers have posted a great suggestion from Timothy of Ohio on grouping shortcuts into contexts with distinct initial characters. Clever. […]
July 16th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
[…] … can be hazardous to your relationship. That’s what TJ, a regular contributor of TextExpander tips, found out. From his blog, in which the TJ household has finally upgraded from dial-up internet: So I’m sitting on the bed with my laptop, and Tracey is working on the Desktop. We’ve been here for several hours — in fact I don’t remember the last time Tracey was up this late. […]
February 15th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
[…] we first started posting TextExpander tips, we got a fairly extensive one from TJ on organizing abbreviations by context. That tip inspired me to use the forward slash (/) as the first character in all my abbreviations […]