TextExpander: Little Things Add Up
Most of my working day, I am sending emails to two people: Greg and Philip, SmileOnMyMac’s co-founders and software developers. After reading Send: The Essential Guide to Email, I decided to more consistently open the emails with “Hi Greg,” “Hi Philip,” and sometimes, “Hi Greg and Philip,” to be a bit less cold.
A lot of us have a mental block against setting up TextExpander snippets for really short things like these phrases, which are 10, 12 and 21 keystrokes each (when you include hitting “Enter” twice, as I invariably do.) You have to use a minimum of 2 keystrokes to trigger the snippet expansion, so how much time do you really save?
This week, I decided to add “Hg” and “Hp” to TextExpander, as well as “HG” for “Hi Greg and Philip,”. And I got curious about how much time would this save me.
Over the past two years, I’ve sent 1145 emails to Greg, 532 emails to Philip and 839 emails addressed to both of them. Subtracting the 2 keystrokes for the abbreviation, I came up with 30,421 keystrokes I could have saved.
When TextExpander calculates how much time you save, it assumes you type 400 characters/minute. But I knew I couldn’t type the “Hi” phrases at that rate, so I tested myself. (Among other things, the iPhone has a great stopwatch…) At the rate, I actually type those phrases (200 characters/minute), I could have saved 2 hours and 32 minutes.
The happiness of finding something else I won’t have to type out over and over again: priceless.
October 9th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
I’ve set a snippet to write (the french equivalent of):
Hi %|,
including the extra line, and I have snippets for the names of the people I write email to most frequently. That way I start all my emails with the trigger for “Hi” and then either write the name of the person or the trigger for the name of those I write to frequently (and then down arrow to get to the text part. I found that, since you often mention person A while writing to person B, it saves time not to have to write names in full, plus you don’t misspell their names. You can also chose not to write the name after the “Hi.”
(131,949 characters saved, 5.5 hours)
October 10th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Denis: That’s a clever use of the cursor positioning macro (%|). Is “Bonjour” the French equivalent of “Hi”? Then you are really saving a lot of keystrokes!
October 11th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Yes, the snippet writes “Bonjour”
Au plaisir,
Denis
September 20th, 2008 at 2:19 am
Any plans to get textexpander version for iphone????
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
We would love to have TextExpander on the iPhone, too!
Unfortunately, the version of TextExpander that would be supported on the iPhone currently is not a version you’d find at all useful–even on a jailbroken iPhone.
We are definitely keeping an eye on the capabilities of the iPhone SDK as it evolves.