I'm very much in both camps. I need to be verbose in my scripts so that months down the track I can easily interpret what I've done. But I like to use abbrevs because I'm lysdexic, I have a claim on the world's worst speller trophy topped off by the fact that I'm not that flash at typing. The fact that I only have a little time that I can devote to scripting is the least of my worries. How blessed I am to be born in the day of computers with spell & syntax checkers.
Anyway I overcame this apparent Catch 22 with CopyPaste: http://www.scriptsoftware.com/copypaste/ - Mac and Windows. I've used CopyPaste for years and believe that it should be built into the OS. 10 clipboards, unlimited remembering of 'Copies' performed, set up clip sets for different programs. It's great. Then a while back they added yType which just adds to it's brilliance. Basically it 'intelligently' guesses what you are going to type and 'offers' to type it for you. Best of all you can set up autocorrections and boilerplates. Autocorrections are just that, you enter a list of words how you normally mistype them, and their corresponding corrections: crad => card feild => field windwo => window teh => the hilight => hilite textColour => textColor every time you type the left hand word, yType will automatically replace it with the correct spelling - you don't do a thing. Of course you can easily cheat and set it up to include: cd => card cds => cards fld => field bkg => background Boilerplates are abbrevs or acronyms you enter and what you'd like typed in their place: mycomp => 25MHz 030 IIci 32MB RAM 40MB SCSI HD NuBus EtherTalk OS 7.5.5 HyperCard 2.4.1 ygtbjr => you've got to be joking, right! tmyolc => tMyOuterLoopCounter tmyilc => tMyInnerLoopCounter tmyvdhn => tMyVeryDescriptiveHandlerName tmyvdfn => tMyVeryDescriptiveFunctionName tmyvdvn => tMyVeryDescriptiveVariableName osvlsn => of stack "Very Long Stack Name" if90th => if () then else end if switch => switch case () break case () break case () break default answer "You shouldn't have got here" end switch For these boilerplates to work, as with any autocompletion, you type in the preset minimum number of letters (I use 4), followed by two spacebars, yType will then replace the abbrev with your desired longhand. This would all be perfect except for one major and one minor problem. The major problem is that CopyPaste works perfectly with every program I use it with, except one - Rev:-( I assume it has something to do with Rev's 'event' based mechanism, which is what CopyPaste uses as well. CopyPaste works as advertised in Rev until you do your first 'Copy' after which any autocompletions or boilerplates will be usurped by whatever is in the clipboard. I tried using it with Galaxy, and although it doesn't suffer the same problem as the Rev Script Editor, when an autocompletion/boilerplate is triggered, a little box is suppose to pop up with one or more suggestions. In the above example, tmyv should pop up a box with three possibilities so you can click on one. In Galaxy that doesn't happen so you evoke the autocomplete 'blind' but can often get a different 'result' than you were expecting - thereby negating any attempt at saving typing strokes. The one 'minor' problem with CopyPaste + yType is that it only has one 'yTypeSuggestion.txt' file which stores every word you type plus your boilerplates. Basically it keeps track of how often you type a word and when your paramaters are met it lists in order of frequency all possible autocompletions. Boilerplates are just words you force into this list which are given a very high number so they will always appear at the top of any autocompletion suggestion list. This can be a little annoying as scripting in Rev has different words appear more often than AppleScript, Perl or HTML and when you return to Mail or regular word processing, you get all sorts of undesirable suggestions. I was able to work around this by writing an AppleScript that created my own text files, basically one for each project/program, and on request move the file to the default location and rename it to 'yTypeSuggestion.txt'. If CopyPaste +yType worked reliably in Rev, with intelligent use of autocorrection and boilerplates I reckon I could have very english like scripts of which only half the keystrokes I actually typed. I live in hope that when Rev solve their "Copy & Paste keyboard short-cut occasionally not working" anomaly, that CopyPaste +yType will then work flawlessly with Rev:-) _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
