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Add a glossary of text strings to Mail.app
Authored by: ether on Oct 04, '04 01:04:19PM

TypeIt4Me (www.typeit4me.com) lets you define short abbreviations
for things you type all the time. I rely heavily on abbreviations in emacs, and the lack of a similar feature systemwide was a serious bummer.

T4M fills the gap (mostly), especially since version 2 came out, which lets you turn it off in some apps (like terminal). You very quickly become dependent on the abbrevs. For example, typing "although" instead of "altho" would be a major pain. It's also handy for common typos, like "adn" which I have set to autocorrect to "and".

I have just under 500 abbrevs--anything I type repeatedly. The more you have, the faster you can type. You can save a lot of time on contractions, too, if you define the right abbrevs: I have "il", "dont", and "theyre" defined to "I'll", "don't", and "they're", respectively. The first saves me a keystroke for the second "l", a shift for the "I" and a pinky move for the dreaded "'".

The only drawbacks are that you have to be careful that you don't define an abbrev that's also something you might want to type, because you might miss it. I once sent mail to my friend "Jan" addressed to "January" :-). Also, it's a bit slow. You have to get used to adding a slight (about 3 keystroke, in my case) pause for it to expand an abbrev, or it eats the keystrokes typed then.



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