Little app to help you code 10+ times faster

We all want to code much faster, right? Well there is a nice app that will help you code much much faster.

We all write same bits of code over and over again. Some of them even 10+ times per day. The app that will help you is called Text Expander. I’m using a commercial text expander but if you search on Google you will probably find one that’s freeware. Just search for “text expander”.

So how does it help?
One small example is that every time when you want to work with jQuery you have to write:

<script type='text/javascript' src='link_to_jquery'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
$(document).ready(function(){

});
</script>

Copy pasting is one solution, but with text expander it’s much faster and easier.
You need 2 things in it:
1) the code
2) the activation text

And next time you want that code, you just write the activation text (for example “startjquery”) and hit the activation key (for example TAB or ENTER, it can be changed), and magically the activation text becomes the code.

Of course, you can have numerous codes and activation texts.

It sure helped me, and i hope it will help you too. :)

And if anyone wants to know, i’m using FastFox, but it’s commercial as i said. I would also like to know which one did you picked or already using.

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8 Responses

Ayhan Alkan

Sep 16th, 09

AutoHotKey (http://www.autohotkey.com/) is a free tool which it has text expansion among a huge list of its capabilities.

Antony

Sep 16th, 09

You can create templates in eclipse for this too.

Thing is though, I like having to type the same bits of code over and over – it makes me remember it. Otherwise I’d come to rely on my text expander, which wouldn’t help me in an interview situation

Daniel Bos

Sep 16th, 09

Any good IDE should support this out-of-the-box. At least in Eclipse it’s easy to create templates to do this.

Boba

Sep 16th, 09

@Ayhan Alkan – Thanks, will check it out for sure :)

@Antony – Well yeah, it helps remember the code, but once you remember it you can spare a lot of time by using this. Sometimes when you are in a hurry to finish a project this helps a lot :)

@Daniel – Not everyone is using good IDE’s. :)

fsilber

Sep 16th, 09

Good tools don’t make you write or generate the same bit of code ten times a day. Those which do, suck.

Wicket and GWT, in contrast, let you abstract out the common bits, because all of the web page’s logic (even the display logic) is written in _JAVA_.

Giorgio Sironi

Sep 17th, 09

An important principle is Don’t Repeat Yourself; I think that if you’re writing many times a day the piece with $(document).ready() you have to consider using a php template (more complicated: Zend_View_Helper_HeadScript and similar). :)

Boba

Sep 17th, 09

I often work on modifying websites so i can’t use templates, that’s where expander comes handy, i just type startjquery hit TAB and voila i got the page set up for jquery :)

teebee

Jan 27th, 10

I know this is an older thread but just in case others stumble across it I’ve been using PhraseExpress (http://www.phraseexpress.com/) for Windows and like it.