Text expander and clipboard enhancer tools

Posted by 22111
Nov 30, 2013 at 02:59 PM

Two things:

It’s 55,50 euro PLUS vat, and so we have got here another example of not-totally correct dollar-vs-euro conversion.

But I also would like to say that both “Dr Andus” ’ intervention at the developer and his blog article about the results, and the developer further developing his tools, are of admirable brilliance, and that the results cannot be underestimated; I think this has been a decisive step in the right direction.

Some remarks, all perfectly minor in comparison:

- I’m not happy with the tab key as the trigger key, should be any key, e.g. the one between my “jklöä” and my return key?
- I’m not happy with the pop-up window always appearing. I understand that it should appear when you cannot be sure yet, but in (almost) unequivocal cases, the tool should just type the full word, without any list popping up
- the same for the trigger key being needed

Now how could this be achieved? Perhaps this way:

We are in face of “learning software” - as said, the relevance of this cannot be underestimated. Now if the tool has any doubt since there are several possibilities left, with your typing, it will pop up the list, and in the form “Dr Andus” describes, meaning presenting it by presumed order of “chance” for the terms it deems possible here (this presumes some terms might not be yet within the respective “sub-vocabulary” yet), but if the tool has learned, from your previous use, that your key combination would indicate some of your “standard” terms, let’s say a word you will have selected at least twice from the list, even when technically there would be another alternative (but which you did not select once), the tool should simply enter this exact term, even at the risk of “guessing wrong”.

Of course, whenever such a guess is wrong, so that you must correct it (there should be, and probably is, a dedicated key combination to trigger this), the tool should then choose other “completing characters” for the lesser (or not-at-all) used words that theoretically might apply, and there should be “completion char” selection by frequency, and even by easiness of typing (and this from start on), which means that for frequently-used words (= for new users, the tool should analyse the texts you will have written without using it), the tool should select completion chars that will come “naturally”, on a standard keyboard (ultimately, even USA/GB/D etc. vs. F/E/I etc.), i.e. which can by typed by another finger, and/or by your other hand, and in the same line of thought, less frequent words (in YOUR texts) should ask for longer shortcuts than words you’ll be in need of again and again, even if they are “rarer” from a general-frequency statistical pov.

Once, I read somebody saying that this Nagarsoft product wasn’t but a paid replica of another, free program. It seems they have come a long way from that possible starting point, if it ever was true. Congrats!

Of course, any such tool (and of which in this case the possibilities are much broader than text expansion in AHK is) will not replace AHK (or AI or any other scripting language) for their non-text-expansion functionality and thus should work together with them without fault; for some cheap text expanders, this is not always the case.

But it seems that PhraseExpander is the top offering in text expansion today. I will continue to do my text expansion with AHK for the time being, but I’m eager to buy this commercial whenever it becomes near perfect, and chances are it will.