Emulate the best auto-text ever: BlackBerry
Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2011 11:59 pm
I was a BlackBerry user and advocate since the very first units back in the 90s. BlackBerry Auto-text is literally the ONE feature that kept me from jumping ship 'til I learned about SKP on Android. I love SKP, but I think it could do so much more to help its users:
Two crucial additional macros:
The only character that should be "special" in the replacement side of an auto-text should be the percent character, which is escaped by typing "%%". Periods, question marks, commas, newlines, and so forth should be allowed. Also, the replacement text input should be a text-area, not a single-line input, to permit such lengthier expansions.
Backspace after expansion leaves expansion in place
I commented on this in another thread, but it bears repeating: backspacing after an auto-text expansion should just remove the character that triggered the expansion, not undo the expansion itself. A second press of backspace would undo the expansion. A third would begin deleting characters from the keyword.
User-Defined Macros
This doesn't exist on BlackBerry, but could also be useful: ten user-defined macros, %0 - %9, which could be reusable in other auto-texts for such things as the user's email address, first name, last name, and so forth.
Two crucial additional macros:
- %b - Backspace
- %B - Forward Delete
- %- - Don't include expansion trigger (this one's not from BlackBerry, but from TypeIt4Me on the Mac, where it performs the expansion when a space or punctuation character is typed, but does not include the space our punctuation character. This would eliminate the need for the item "Backspace after expansion leaves expansion in place" below.
The only character that should be "special" in the replacement side of an auto-text should be the percent character, which is escaped by typing "%%". Periods, question marks, commas, newlines, and so forth should be allowed. Also, the replacement text input should be a text-area, not a single-line input, to permit such lengthier expansions.
Backspace after expansion leaves expansion in place
I commented on this in another thread, but it bears repeating: backspacing after an auto-text expansion should just remove the character that triggered the expansion, not undo the expansion itself. A second press of backspace would undo the expansion. A third would begin deleting characters from the keyword.
User-Defined Macros
This doesn't exist on BlackBerry, but could also be useful: ten user-defined macros, %0 - %9, which could be reusable in other auto-texts for such things as the user's email address, first name, last name, and so forth.