Help files

Discussion, questions and support.
Post Reply
jrwf555
Posts: 43
Joined: Nov 6th, ’17, 04:29

Post by jrwf555 » Nov 6th, ’17, 04:45

Hi, I'm new to Fastkeys and I find the lack of information quite bewildering. Having searched the forum, and having a little familiarity with ahk, I still find myself floundering with sometimes cryptic explanations or an absence of information about different items, such as the preferences area.

For instance, an earlier poster had trouble with the / (forward slash key) as an expander. Me too: it took ages to work out that this was caused by avoiding ending characters. But after making changes (for instance, changing i/v to i=v to expand this to 'interview' or s/t to sociotechnical, same problem) I discovered this still didn't work, even though '=' isn't an ending character.

Yes, I'd appreciate help on this one area. But more to the point, in just the Text Expander preferences, it's very difficult to follow what switching on or off different items actually means, or does.

In short, I'm not finding the program very user friendly because of such a shortage of documentation - and simply going to the vast ahk forum isn't really much help - I just came from there!
User avatar
Marko
Posts: 1718
Joined: Mar 2nd, ’13, 21:02

Post by Marko » Nov 6th, ’17, 15:09

Hi and welcome to FastKeys forum. Your comments are highly appreciated and such feedback helps us to constantly improve our product. We are aware of the issue and will work on it in future releases.

Please let me clarify two Text Expander options:

Ending characters are characters that need to be typed to trigger the text substitution. Typically these are space, comma, full stop and many others - the whole list can be defined in Preferences/Text Expander/Ending characters.

Separator is a character which allows multiple abbreviation strings and multiple substitutes. In the provided example "ys/sy/yf/fy", all "ys", "sy", "yf" and "fy" abbreviations will trigger the same substitute. In another example ",op", the same abbreviation can trigger multiple substitutes which can be selected by user. The default separator is "/" which can be changed in Preferences/Text Expander/Separator.

If you wish to use "/" in your abbreviations (like "i/w"), you just need to change the separator character to something else, for example "|".

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you will have any other question or comment.
jrwf555
Posts: 43
Joined: Nov 6th, ’17, 04:29

Post by jrwf555 » Nov 6th, ’17, 17:57

Thanks, Marko. Your reply was clear and I understood what you wrote. But let me pursue the example because it still leaves a problem.

I'll use the expansion of 'interview' as an example. I can't use a 'iv' as the trigger word because that also stands as the Roman numeral 'iv'. If I insert any other symbol then I get 'I' triggered or other word parts. So it's not clear what kind of symbol I can insert to trigger 'interview' - unless I remove one of the ending characters. But maybe this will trigger malfunctions in other parts of Fastkeys.

Second, suppose I want to undo an expansion. For instance, sometimes I want to substitute to type 'New Zealand' and I use the abbreviation 'nz'. But I don't always want this expanded. If I 'nz' is part of an email address eg 'abc@xtra.co.nz' it's fatal to expand it. Currently, I have to quit Fastkeys to stop this, which is mad! Is there an 'undo' function in the programme which executes this? And an 'undo' for any operation in Fastkeys? Again, I couldn't find information in the forum or Help File.
User avatar
Marko
Posts: 1718
Joined: Mar 2nd, ’13, 21:02

Post by Marko » Nov 6th, ’17, 18:57

You can use other characters in the abbreviation string, including ending characters - there is no need to remove ending characters from the list. In general, you should choose abbreviations which do not conflict with normal text - this is a main principle and all text expander software work like this. Some people use a standard prefix, like comma, tick etc., others choose longer abbreviations.

In your case you could for example use "itw" or ",iv" (note the ending character "," can be used too). Pressing Escape would always cancel the expansion.
jrwf555
Posts: 43
Joined: Nov 6th, ’17, 04:29

Post by jrwf555 » Nov 7th, ’17, 09:28

Thanks again. I've adjusted the examples I gave along the lines you suggested, using ',iv' for 'interview', for instance, and it works consistently.

On the other hand, pressing the escape key after an expansion to cancel it doesn't work at all, whichever expansion I try. Nothing happens at all. I assume by 'cancel' this is the equivalent of an undo command. Since I can't get this to work can you clarify?
User avatar
Marko
Posts: 1718
Joined: Mar 2nd, ’13, 21:02

Post by Marko » Nov 7th, ’17, 10:24

What I meant was that pressing Escape before the expansion cancels the internal processing of the abbreviation. You can undo the expansion by Windows Undo (Ctrl-Z).
jrwf555
Posts: 43
Joined: Nov 6th, ’17, 04:29

Post by jrwf555 » Nov 7th, ’17, 20:29

Again, thanks for a helpful clarification. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite resolve the issue I was raising.

If I take my original example: I trigger 'New Zealand' by typing 'nz' - I live in New Zealand, so I use it a lot. But in email addresses, for example, I don't want the expansion - otherwise I get abc@email.co.New Zealand, which is useless.

While I could click cancel as it processes, I've got to be really, really quick on the draw to cancel in time. If I undo with Ctrl-Z, I'm left with no expression - the input has been erased. If I then try to type 'nz', I'm back to the same dilemma.

Even typing this here, with FastKeys, I have to leave a space, 'n z', to stop the trigger. So, is there a way to 'undo' a phrase back to its original string? There are lots of cases where this is useful, not just 'nz'.

I ask because it's been a discussion point on ahk forums that seems to produce perplexity and complicated coding, and was one of the reasons I came to FastKeys in the first place.

I'd really appreciate your help if you have a solution.
User avatar
Marko
Posts: 1718
Joined: Mar 2nd, ’13, 21:02

Post by Marko » Nov 7th, ’17, 21:10

Few thoughts:
- you could use "Manual confirmation" option to manually confirm the expansion. Press Escape or just continue typing if you don't want it.
- you could change the string to "NZ" and enable "Case sensitive" option - this way "NZ" will trigger and "nz" not.
- if you type "abc@mail.nz" and press Escape, there will be no trigger and you can continue typing.
- if using "nz" as abbreviation conflicts with other strings why don't you change it to something else?
jrwf555
Posts: 43
Joined: Nov 6th, ’17, 04:29

Post by jrwf555 » Nov 8th, ’17, 02:43

Thanks, Marco. I understand all the options you suggested. In particular, I hadn't realized that for escape to work, it has to be *before* the following trigger (eg a space) that sets off the expansion. This works perfectly and 'nz' is resolved.

On this one point (I don't need a reply to it) it's puzzling why something as simple as this option, alone, hasn't been suggested in the ahk forums. Or if it has, I haven't found it.

I will almost certainly have other puzzles - I do not understand how many of the preferences in FastKeys (and I'm sure I'm not alone), but I'll raise these as needed.

For instance, I stumbled across the ahk substitutions in the Text Expander Autocorrect English file - but only after I had laboriously loaded them in from an ahk script. Of course, two similar scripts led to various double triggers happening.

But many thanks for your assistance and fast replies.
Post Reply