The Cranking Widgets Blog

For those who aren’t readers of the venerable Lifehacker (and if this includes you – for shame ) – Adam wrote a little windows application awhile back called Texter that allows you to create hotstrings that expand to longer pieces of text. For example, when I type ‘cwb’ and hit Tab, it replaces ‘cwb’ with ‘http://blog.crankingwidgets.com’. Basically, you just create a short representation of a long piece of text that you type regularly and let Texter do the heavy lifting.

Obviously, the benefits of an application like this are immediately apparent and are virtually without limit. As such, there are some more esoteric uses that I’ve implemented that I think you all will enjoy (beyond things like email signatures and URLs)…

• Frequently Changed Information – Where I work, we’re required to change our password every 90 days. During the first 5 days after the change happens, you can pretty much bank on me typing in the old password at least 10 times per day. The easy (albeit horribly insecure) solution? Every time the password changes, it’s much easier to update the ‘dompass’ alias in Texter. (Seriously, this is terribly ill-advised. It’s just an example).
• Commonly-used Directories – One cool bit about Texter is that it (thankfully) has a shortcut for the Windows key, which means you also have access to the Run box. One of the many ways you can use this to your advantage is to simply open a directory in explorer. For example, I have a hotstring defined with the following value:

  #rC:\\Development\\{Tab}{Enter}

  This opens the folder with all of my development projects (something I do several times per day). The best part is that I can type ‘devd’, hit the Tab key and voilá – the directory’s open and the ‘dird’ I typed earlier is gone!

• Programming Shortcuts – Ok, so this probably isn’t something most of you will use, but I use this one constantly. Anybody who spends any amount of time dealing with SQL knows the feeling of typing this:

  select * from 

  My trusty ’ssf’ hotstring expands to just that. Again, this one gets fired off at least 10-20 times per day.

• Ad hoc Email Distribution Lists – If your email application/provider doesn’t support the creation of short lists of contacts (like a list of your poker buddies, or all the guys in the bowling league), this should help you. Define a hotkey like ‘,,bowling’ and have it expand to something like:

  bob@gobowling.com;tim@gobowling.com;larry@gobowling.com

  (Most email programs use a semicolon to separate addresses, yours might use a comma). So next time you’re emailing all of your friends from the yacht club, all you have to type is ‘,,yacht’

• Unix-style Home Directory – Having been something of a Linux nut in a past life, there are certain things I became accustomed to when interacting with a command line. One of which was being able to use the tilde (~) in place of my home directory name. For example:

  ~/music

  was the same as

  /home/bkelly/music

  Well, this one isn’t quite as flexible, but it’s a start. Create a new hostring with just a ~ and put C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsername\ as the value. Then just type ~ and hit tab and you’re ready to rock.

Applications like Texter have an amazing amount of flexibility, and these are just a few of the ways you can bend it to your will. Anybody else got any fun/creative uses? Because I’d love to hear them!

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