Your Keyboard On Steroids

I do a lot of writing, so it’s only natural to expect that I’ll make some typing mistakes. My favorite tools are ones that save me time and reduce my chances of making typos.

Do you frequently type the same phrase, sentence, or paragraph over and over as you write different documents and emails? Want to automate that task? Shortkeys is a utility that allows you to set up replacement text for portions of text that you define. You set up an abbreviation to represent the section of text.

ShortKeys monitors your keyboard activity and anytime it finds that one of the abbreviations has been typed in, it automatically replaces it with the text you have defined.

Your abbreviation can be up to 32 characters, making it easy for you to describe (and remember) the shortcut. Your replacement text can be up to 3000 characters. You can have 15 shortcuts in the free version of the program.

I recommend that you use the “prefix” method to activate your shortcuts. You set up one or two characters to add at the beginning of the shortcut to activate it. I use “##”

That prevents the shortkey from getting triggered accidentally; you have to type the prefix first. This method also allows the abbreviation to be used without its associated replacement text.