Nontrivial Exercises

RapidoWrite Fills In Your Blanks

Before I describe how I have come to use and depend on RapidoWrite, I want to detail a little background for other recent converts to Mac from a PC.

I’ve written about Roboform being one of the critical apps I used on my PC to securely store and manage my passwords and website login info. Another critical app was ActiveWords, the many-things-to-many-people app of the PC.

ActiveWords allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to execute scripts, auto-type text, initiate programs or open webpages. It’s both simple and incredibly useful and really became the heart of how I controlled things on my PC. There is a lot more to say about ActiveWords that I won’t say here, I’ll leave it at this: if you are using a PC, then I am confident that you will use it more efficiently with ActiveWords and I highly recommend you check it out.

So, just as I looked for a replacement for Roboform on the Mac, I also sought out a replacement app for ActiveWords on the Mac. It turns out that QuickSilver does many things ActiveWords can do - plus a whole lot more - and does it much more elegantly. It’s hard to fully describe QuickSilver, but on a very basic level it’s a keyboard-activated program launcher. To see more about QuickSilver, check out the MacBreak videos on Quicksliver - episodes 17 and 12.

One thing that QuickSilver does not do, however, is auto-type text, or take a keyboard shortcut and replace it with other text. If you don’t want to keep typing your email address over and over when you fill out forms, you would like to be able to enter a simple keyboard shortcut and then have it automatically expand to your complete email address. You can do this with web page URL’s, long names that you frequently type, or even entire sentences (or paragraphs) of text that you commonly write (e.g. a form thank-you email).

With ActiveWords on a PC you can do this easily, and RapidoWrite on the Mac gives you the same capability. When you start RapidoWrite, you are presented with a database window where you can define your keyboard shortcuts and resulting text expansions.

I’ve setup a couple of simple ones - my email address, which I’ve abbreviated as “ntem”, the websites for 2 of my blogs - “nte” = http://www.nontrivialexercises.com and “bts” = http://www.beneaththesurface.ws - plus the URL’s of my del.icio.us page and my flickr page.

After making any modifications to the window, you click on “Refresh the memory”, which updates your abbreviations to the active process running in RAM. Then you can close the window and go do your stuff.

RapidoWrite stays running and constantly monitors keystrokes whenever you are in a Cocoa application on your Mac. When it finds that you entered one of your abbreviations, it will quickly pop up a window with your expanded text. If you do indeed want to insert that text then press enter; otherwise just keep typing and the window will go away.

Here you can see the popup window appear just after I typed “nte” in the Safari address bar:

One note: as I alluded to above, RapidoWrite will only find your keyboard shortcuts / abbreviations when you’re working in a Cocoa app. Cocoa apps are those applications that use Apple’s underlying Cocoa framework - applications that are purely UNIX-based or that run through X11 are not Cocoa apps. This means that RapidoWrite will not work within Firefox on your Mac; however, it will on Camino, a Firefox edition built just for Macs. It also will not work from within Paralells or when using OpenOffice.org for example, as these are not Cocoa applications.

You will want to choose keyboard shortcuts, or abbreviations, that are both easy to remember and not part of common words. Once you get this setup and working, I think you’ll find that this will become and indispensable tool. It sure has for me.

One more thing - though it takes 2 Mac applications to replace what ActiveWords offers on the PC, both QuickSilver and RapidoWrite are free, while ActiveWords retails for $49.95.

Thanks to Frank De Graeve and his review of RapidoWrite on his Neat Little Mac Apps podcast for turning me on to it.