LintaList AutoHotKey Text expander with user defined variables

There is a LintaList web page that has links to all the good stuff such as latest download, videos and other interesting things.

I’m thinking that this may be better for my text expander items as I can go and check on them and also pull them up and search for them , rather than using AutoCorrect where you have to go and look them up.

Horses for courses. This allows you to do quickly go and check what you have stored with a quick hotkey/abbreviation then you can tweak it if you are finding that you don’t remember the previous one.

So what its offering is a balance between AHK Command Picker and AutoCorrect with a few other items on the side.

LintaList plugins

In LintaList plugins you can add variables of different types, these are only available when you install another snippet and that dialogue comes up.

You can nest plugins within plugins but you have to get the syntax right or it doesn’t work. Some of the time its just easier to write a simple script instead. Date Time

Input box

A nice feature is the input box, which means that you can use a shortcut key and write an email and then have it pop up for subject or other info that you want to add as you go.

Choice

This is a handy way to pick options. I’m trying it out on a list of emails to choose from.

Also I’ll try and see if I can setup a few email signatures too.

Counters

I initially thought this wasn’t much use but I’m combining it with Date.Time to do a setup for each day of my Covid diary. It actually works quite well. It means I can start a new page for the next day without copying/pasting and editing the previous day.

Covid Diary [[DateTime=dddd, dd. MMMM. yyyy|1|Days]] – Level 2 -Day [[Counter=blogger]] (blogger counter set to 55 at the moment)- Date set to tomorrow, for article setup for the next day.

Date Time

This is handy. I’m just setting one up for Covid Diary- see above, and I’m looking at a bunch of different setups for Time display similar to my multi-tap key so that I can check up on these

File

This reads from a file and displays what is in the file. I can use this for my signature.txt file that I have the HTML stuff in.

Calc

I was trying to set this up for some calculations, eg doing simple maths, this has to write it somewhere for you to see the result.

I think its better to write a script with Input boxes and then have a MsgBox display the answer. There is a demo for MsgBox but its not being passed the variable from the Snippet, so you might as well write it all in script format. You can have triple input box (gui) and choose 2 numbers and action (+-/*)

Not working too well in browser

I thought I’d substitute it for some of my AutoCorrect stuff, and have been setting it up on my computers to do so, but…..

I have found that the AutoHotKeys in AutoCorrect work fine but I was getting inconsistencies in the browser where the Keyboard Shortcuts for text expansion were not working. I looked on the githb bug page but not much mentioned there.

I’ve since changed trigger keys (Tab, Spacebar) to just Spacebar and it seems to be working better now.

I did note in the article that I had to reload LintaList as the Keyboard Shortcuts stopped working.

End comment

It’s a fun schema and it has some interesting things. Its sort of half way between no code and some code. You can mess with the variables.

Sometimes setting up the variables takes some time, especially nested ones, but once setup right you don’t have to think about them.

I do like the 3 options you have- 1/pop-up box and search and choose, 2/ shortcut letters and 3/hotkeys. So if one doesn’t work you always have the backup.

The other thing I like about it is that you can go and check on your keys, so if you aren’t using some you can get rid of them, as they become less relevant over time.

Messing with some of the variables, I think its easier sometimes just to write a short script instead, and being able to use a Keyboard Shortcut to trigger them is great.

Its got a couple of issues that I’m finding:

• sometimes if there are 2 letters for Keyboard Shortcut then sometimes it leaves the initial letter there and expands from the 2nd letter.
• Sometimes the Keyboard Shortcuts stop working and you have to restart LintaList

I’ll persevere with it for a while, I do recall having it on my PC years back and used it a little, but the preset title for Covid diaries is neat. Being able to combine counter and Date/time variables is pleasing.

Video

Added comments Saturday 6 November 2021

Still buggy, I tried a different branch with Hotkey strings but that just seems to pull info from clipboard, even for different keys. Tried tc & ll and it just gave me what I’d last had on the clipboard.

It also reset my original menu on the main LintaList setup and I’ve had to redo that in the original setup- I’m starting to spend too much time on this for it to be useful.

I’ve now used MaxLauncher to target LintaList.ahk and then in argument put Run Reload label so that I can use hotkey to reload it quickly, so if it stops working I can now just reload it (before I had to use Reload Bundles to make this happen from ribbon pull down from pop-up or traymenu). Hopefully this will see me right. Maybe a hotkey might be a good solution too, but I’ll try this method first.

We’ll see if this sorts it out. I may have to go back to autoCorrect instead, this is far too tiresome.

Monday 15 November 2021

Still buggy, I’m having to reboot almost every time I want to use it. A bit frustrating. Still handy to add other items. Maybe once I have the ones I want I can go back to autoCorrect instead and write a few scripts to use with MaxLauncher.

Friday 26 November 2021

On main PC & laptop I’ve stopped Lintalist starting on PC startup but still have the program installed.

The laptop has Beeftext but that is acting a bit weird, whereas the aText which is a windows program (not AutoHotKey ) seems pretty robust. The extra’s look nice but expensive, although for 5 pc’s over a year there are productivity gains. As I’m not employed its best I stick with the free version for now.

Beeftext

Still too buggy,in fact its getting annoying as I have to use MaxLauncher to keep on rebooting it. There comes a time when you cut your losses with a program and look at other ways to do things. This is not working for me as its toooooo unreliable. Breaks your focus having to restart it all the time.

I’ll move on to some others I found this article and will setup Beeftext which I’ve used before.

Beeftext is a bit more limited , it won’t do the date stuff of Lintalist so I’ll need to build something in my email multitap file sometime.

It was being a bit buggy at the beginning. I’ll need to play with the settings a bit.

aText

aText looks a bit more like LintaList as it has date variables. I did download it on my Microsoft Surface Laptop but never really used it. There is a free and paid version. Hopefully I can access the variables (no , paid is 38$ for 5 computers)

The free version looks adequate enough for my needs although the extra fuctionality looks good.

It also seems a lot more reliable than Beeftext so far. I’ve exported snippets to a file for access by laptop.

I’ve just been doing an updating script for the covid diary- a bit messy- needed an ini file to hold the count and also a couple of functions to convert to and from unix so I can add a day.