Expansions

Expansions enable you to produce more text with fewer keystrokes.

Moreover, with Instant Text Commands, expansions can produce more than text.

With its unique Glossary Ecosystem and its user-friendly Expansion Tables, you are able to boost your productivity with little memorization.

Working with Instant Text you will quickly get used to the following 2-step "reach and trigger" approach: as an Instant Text user you are constantly thinking about the best way to reach the expansion you are longing for, the first step being to type whatever characters it takes until your target expansion gets displayed in one of the expansion tables.

Once your target expansion is in sight, if it is on top position it is a no-brainer, you just expand it using a Trigger Key. Else you have the 3 possibilities to move the highlight.

  1. Add an extra letter, a relevant one, that will help your target expansion move to the top position.
  2. Use the line number selection.
  3. Or else use expansion table navigation hotkeys.

Example

Imagine we have typed chat:

You may wonder how Instant Text can decide whether:

Expansion Trigger Keys are part of the answer.

For example, we use the Phrase Marker ; to tell Instant Text to expand a phrase abbreviation:

Type to get

chat;

Contractor hereby agrees to

Similarly, we use the Word Marker [ to tell Instant Text to expand a word abbreviation:

Type to get

chat[

characteristics

Finally, if our intention is just to type the word chat, we can press the space bar and continue typing.

These examples have used the single characters ; and [ as Markers but the Expansion Options allow you to select other single characters as your own Markers. You can also choose to use the space bar to expand phrases but then you will need to be careful when you want to type a simple word such as chat followed by a space (you will need to type Escape before the space to avoid interpretation as an abbreviation).

On a pen system, you don’t even need a Marker: you just tap on the right choice.