The mouse was a great invention. It was, without a doubt, one of the catalysts that moved computing from the lab to the office and home.
However, experienced users often find that the mouse sometimes gets in the way and slows us down. Moving a hand from keyboard to mouse breaks the flow of many operations.
OS vendors realised this and gave keyboard shortcuts to many common operations. But many of these aren’t as intuitive as they could be.
Enter SureType
SureType allows you configure shortcuts for absolutely anything. Once configured, you perform an operation simply by typing your shortcut followed by a backslash – regardless of whatever application you are using at the time.
I have been running SureType for about a week now and I can say, without hesitation, that it is proving to be a major boost to my overall productivity. I can’t recommend it strongly enough!
Sounds pretty promising. I’ve also been meaning to try out SlickRun as well, but haven’t had a chance to really try it.
Sounds like similar technology for keyboard only types – although the SureType docs imply you can type pretty much anywhere, whereas with SlickRun you have to type in its little box. Oh, SlickRun is free as far as I know.
With SureType you can type anywhere, regardless of the foreground application.
I haven’t bought SureType yet (still within the trial period) so I’ll check SlickRun out (thanks for the pointer).
While this seems like a good idea, what if I want to type one of the special “hot words” that I’ve configured SureType to look for as normal text? Perhaps that there is an Excel folder on my hard drive which I want to open, so I type “c:\program files\excel\” (for example), and Excel starts up, even though that isn’t want I wanted.
Personally, I use WinKey for this sort of thing. Sure, it has some (minor) issues when running as non-admin, but other than that I haven’t had any problems with it whatsoever.
The expansion key (“\” by default) can be configured to be whatever you want it to be. So, obviously, you choose a character that you don’t use in day-to-day operations.