Setting Up Abbreviations

Before Easy Keys can start helping you, you have to tell it the abbreviations you want to create and the snippets they will expand into. To do this left clicking on the Easy Keys icon on the task bar. This will bring up the screen that lets you create abbreviations and snippets.

You can also use a hotkey to bring up this screen. It defaults to ALT-Left Windows Key but you can change it by changing the "Configure application hotkey" setting in the Options dialog.

To create a new abbreviation and corresponding snippet. Click on the 'new' button in the bottom left corner of the screen. This will bring up the screen that allows you to add and edit abbreviations.

Create the abbreviation you want to assign a snippet to, and then add the abbreviation to a category. If you leave the category blank it will automatically be added to the "general" category. If case sensitive checked then Easy Keys will only expand the abbreviation if it is type in exactly the same case as you defined it in the abbreviations field. Otherwise it will be expanded no matter how you type it. Finally, fill in the snippet of text that will replace this abbreviation and 'Ok' to save your new abbreviation.

An abbreviation can be anything you want, but it is best to make it something you can remember when typing. You also want to keep them short and make sure they are unique. The unique part is very important. Let's say you are trying to define an abbreviation for "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." and you called it "fox". Now every time you type "fox" it will get expanded into the sentence. Which means you can no longer use the word "fox" by itself. A good way to guard against this problem is to preface all your abbreviations with !. So in this case you could call it "!fox". Which is probably something you would never type.

You can edit and remove existing abbreviations by clicking on them in 'Abbreviaton' section of the screen and then clicking the edit or delete buttons. You can also edit the snippet assciated with an abbreviation at any time, by clicking on the abbreviation and then editing the snippet in the right hand pane.

If you want to seperate your snippets into seperate files to make them easier to manage you can. To create a new snippet file click on the 'New File' button, and then choose a name for the new file. Only snippet files in that default folder will be loaded automatically. You can go back and edit a different file by clicking on the '...' button and then choose the file you want to edit.

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