Timothy 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.
- For HTML shortcuts, I start with “<“. For example: <3 =
%|
stuff (see below)- 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
Then I also have some of what I like to call “recursive” shortcuts which involve two shortcuts:
- For chat shortcuts I start with “!”, eg. !yw (you’re welcome) or !ty (Thank you!) or !bbin (I’ll be be back in %| minutes)
- 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 cell in 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).
And 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 have shortcuts for each day of the week @mon @tue @wed etc which expand to “Monday at “
- I have another shortcut @remind: “Just a reminder we will be meeting ” and then I add @mon or @tue and then add the time too I 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 @home.
I think those are all my tips! Oh here is
- I use a shortcut of 1//2 for ½
Thanks, Timothy, for the good ideas.
