Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 52: Reduce Repetitive Typing with Texter for Windows

Level Medium

Platform Windows

Cost Free

If you spend your day at a keyboard, chances are, you type particular phrases — such as “Thanks for contacting us” — several times throughout the day. Maybe you’ve acquired a maddening habit of typing teh instead of the when your fingers are flying over the keys. Perhaps you enter the current date into documents all the time, or you tend to use Internet acronyms such as “imo” to stand for “in my opinion.”

These are all situations in which text substitution can save you time. You can define short abbreviations for phrases you use often or misspellings you’re prone to, and automatically expand those abbreviations to their full, intended form. This hack explains how to do that using the free Windows application Texter.

Set Up Texter Hotstrings

To start using Texter, follow these steps:

1. Download Texter from http://lifehacker.com/238306/ and install it to your computer. (Texter is a portable application, so you can either use the installer or just download Texter.exe and put it in any folder on your desktop.)

2. Double-click Texter.exe to run the program for the first time.

3. A green icon with the letters “LH” on it appear in your Windows system tray; right-click it and choose Manage Hotstrings to start configuring abbreviations that will do your typing for you.

Adding Hotstrings

The next step is to create a new hotstring. To do so, follow these instructions:

1. Click the + sign. ...