vB Code utility?

I was wondering, with all the tech-savy people on this board, has anyone created a freeware/shareware utility for inserting vB code?

When you’re responding to a long post, it gets annoying typing all those brackets, slashes and codes. It’d be cool if there was a utility that, say, let you highlight text and click an italics button.

(Don’t look at me though, I had enough trouble doing a pathetic currency converter in Visual Basic!)

I’ve seen a UBB board that has this. I would imagine there probably already is an add-on for vBulletin that will do this, possibly written by a user of a different vBulletin board. However, there are many members who post far more than you or me, and your request is the first I’ve seen for this, indicating little or no previous demand for it here. Since the Chicago Reader completely supports the SDMB, it’s unlikely they would want to devote resources to anything that isn’t urgently needed. Sorry.

One alternative could be to compose your posts in MS Word or some other program and write macros to do this. Or perhaps your keyboard supports its own macros.

Forget about that. What I want is an add-on for Microsoft Word or Word Perfect which would auto-convert [[sub][/sub]i] to italics… I mean, that’s the way I always try to type it anyway.

Actually, they have already, guys. It’s called vBulletin 2.0.3, the newest version of the software. It has an advanced “New Thread” and “Reply” page which gives you quick access to inserting tags, closing tags, inserting links, smilies, figures, etc.