I (still) use QuicKeys but it’s pretty obsolete on both Mac and Windows platform, I only use it because I’m accustomed to it and it does still work. If I were starting over, I’d go with Keyboard Maestro for the Mac, no idea what I’d opt for if I were a Windows user these days.
I’ve always had a macro app since back in the System 6 days. Something so that when I hit (for example) Control-F4 in a certain program, it selects the menu item to duplicate the line I’m on, click the “Reassign” button, picks the third entry from the top by going downarrow downarrow enter, and clicks the Save button.
Macros are really helping me out a lot these days because I work from home correcting the computer’s attempt to interpret scantron-style forms with text fields. For any given customer we deal with, I load something akin to 25 macros with a keystroke for customer name, one for primary customer address, one each for five or six other recurrent addresses, maybe twelve for names of customer service reps who signed the forms, and so on.
With the ability to set up loops that call another macro and wait until some condition X is met and then do it again and again and again until some condition Y is met, I can kick off a macro that runs for hours and does incredibly complex things.
I think it depends on what one’s spending most of one’s computer time doing. I occasionally do one of a few things for which that would be useful; but the amount of extra time I spend doing them in a given year without a macro program is almost certainly a lot less than I’d spend selecting such a program, learning how to use it, and keeping track of whether I’d set control-F4 to do something or control-F5.
If I were doing such things for several hours a day several times a week, that would be different. And I’d be using control-whatever often enough that I’d remember it.
Well, I have spent a rather impressive amount of time on the Straight Dope Message Board. So I made macros long ago that insert quote tags, bold tags, italics tags, strikethru tags, and so on
Most of that’s an icon right there in the reply window; and was on the old boards, also. So I don’t feel that I need separate macros for it.
– if you want to do everything from the keyboard, I suppose that’s fractionally faster. Although ** command-B** and command-I seem to work also. I guess I don’t often feel a need to use strikethru.
What I did is select the above text, then press the Reply button.
So the “quick command” for producing a quote is to select text with your mouse (or finger, or keyboard) then to press literally any reply button on the screen. Try it! And you can repeat that as many times as you like to make as many quotes as you like.
I’m trying to paste in multiple paragraphs from sources other than the SDMB. For instance, I might want to post two paragraphs from an AP or Washington Post story. I can copy them as one block; I’d like to use paste them in between the quote commands without having to actually type the quote commands on their own lines every time.
… .