Speed Up Your Writing: Typing Utilities Compared

Sometimes you stumble upon a piece of software that’s just wonderful, and you wish you knew it before. Software that really enhances the computer interface. The most important piece of software in that category is Quicksilver (also read my recent post about Quicksilver).
Another thing I discovered about a year ago was a tool that finishes your sentences. It’s like a fully customizable version of predictive text input for your computer.

What do those little tools do? They help you type. By setting up a list of sentences you use a lot and connecting those sentences to an abbreviation that is easy to remember, you create ’shortcuts’ for your text. This is great when you get a lot of email and a lot of people are asking you the same thing over and over again. You can also use it for URL’s email addresses, and signatures.
While writing code or inserting html tags this can also save you a lot of time, as you can imagine.
An example: you can type “wcg” and press return and your letters will expand into “With kind regards”. It is also possible to embed images and links.

For Mac OS X I found four comparable tools. TypeIt4Me, TextExpander, RapidoWrite and Typinator.

TextExpander by Smile on my mac is well known, and was featured on Macbreak. It’s $29.95 and has a lot of options. You can sync your ’snippets’ using .Mac for instance, include formatted text and pictures and a very nice feature: You can position the cursor wherever you want in your expanded snippet.

Type It 4 Me is made by Ettore Software. It’s $27 and it’s features page claims that it has more functionality than TextExpander. But the list isn’t complete because the aforementioned .Mac syncing is not on it for example.

Typinator by Ergonis Software seems very similar to TextExpander. It’s €19,99 and has an easy to use interface. Snippets can be cathegorized and it has a spelling corrections function.

RapidoWrite by App4mac is the only free app of the four. It’s very basic but it works quite well, without all the bells and whistles of its competitors though.

I am using RapidoWrite at the moment, but I might switch to TextExpander, I’m not sure yet. If you like the functionality of these apps you can download RapidoWrite for free or install a trial version of one of the paid ones. I’d be happy to hear which one you prefer!