I have been a fan of Autohotkey for some time, and I use it mostly for text replacement, because after typing “technical requirements” for about the 500th time, your fingers start asking your brain: “Is all this work really necessary?”
Autohotkey excels in the area of replacing text, so I can roll my own keyboard shorthand, e.g.
::tekreks::technical requirements
which expands ‘tekreks’ into ‘technical requirements’ as soon as I type a space, tab, comma, period, or any other “end of word” symbol.
Another text replacement trick I use is the correction of what are, for me, typical typing errors. Much as I hate to admit it, somewhere after a few thousand words of text, I start typing “valve” instead of “valve”, and so I’ve created the following shortcut to keep my target text on the straight and narrow:
::vlave::valve
Recently, I learned—the hard way—that Microsoft Word ignores a depressed shift key if, at the same time, you hit the spacebar. In fact, it turns out I almost always hit the spacebar before releasing the shift key.
What made this knowledge particularly frustrating was learning about it while using the standalone Windows version of Wordfast, which launches a long and distracting “job analysis” task upon receiving a Shift & Space key combination.
So on a hunch, I tried the following definition in my Autohotkey code file, with the idea of having the utility interpret the Shift + Space combination as, simply, a Space:
Shift & Space::
Send {Space}
return
And what do you know? It works like a charm!