Keyword substitutions make life easier

I’m a huge fan of making my life easier and one thing I have found really helpful is automatic text substitution. The Mac has a built-in solution, but it’s slightly clunky as it uses a popup to confirm that you want to substitute, so I use Keyboard Maestro, however there’s many alternatives out there.

My personal preference is to prefix all my substitutions with a semicolon as there are no real words that start with ;.

Initially, I used it for email addresses and address components:

;em1	My 19FT email address
;ema	My Akrabat email address
;add	My full address on a single line
;a1	First line of my address
;tn	My town
;pc	My postcode

I have many other useful ones such as ;lipsum which enters two paragraphs of Lorem ipsum text for me.

At some point, I realised I could use it to create dynamic data:

;date	date in long form (d M Y)
;ds	date (yyyy-MM-dd)
;dt	date with time (yyyy-MM-dd H:i:s)
;du	date for filenames (yyyyMMdd_Hi)
;time	the current time (HH:mm:ss)
;ts	the current time as a unix timestamp
;uuid4	a new UUID4

Recently, after hunting in the special characters dialog box yet again, I realised that I could also add special characters too! So now I’ve added:

;14	the quarter character: ¼
;12	the half character: ½
;34	the three-quarters character: ¾

Sometimes it takes me many repetitions before I realise that I could create a text-substitution macro, but I’m always happy when I have done so.

One thing that’s helpful with Keyboard Maestro is that you can choose whether it pastes the text in after deleting the typed characters or whether it types them. Typing it is slower, but gets around some irritating websites that don’t allow you to paste into text box for no sensible reason.

I use these my test-substitutions all the time and a computer where they are not available. If you’re not using something like this, I recommend that you investigate, particularly for things you type over and over again.