One of the thing that saves me a lot of time these days are keyboard shortcut. Sure, every applications and OSes have some, but some take the concept a little further.

One of these application is the incredible text editor TextMate. If you’re into programming, be it HTML, PHP, Ruby or any other type of text-based work, TextMate can help you quite a bit. It’s not a cheap software per say, but it’s a great tool for those of us coding all day. The reason why it’s so good is that its entire programming language support is based on a scripting language and macros and shortcuts that can be triggered by using a keyboard shortcut. You type a word or a few letter and TextMate will do the rest of you and all it this is done within context so that typing something in a CSS block will do a different action than if you are typing within an HTML block.

If you like that idea but don’t need an advanced text editor, one software I like a lot is TextExpander from Smile On My mac. The software does exactly the same as textmate (it expands a word into a bigger text) but it does so anywhere in the OS. It works within Mail, within Safari, anywhere. It’s a 30$ piece of software, but if you need to write a lot of repetitive text, it’s pretty nice. I’ve been using it lately to answer some repetitive emails and forum support. Since I sometime answer questions in Mail.app, in Firefox or in Safari, it’s useful to have a global software so the shortcuts are available anywhere. The latest version added .Mac synching, which is one of the thing that I really missed before.

The Mac community has a lot of cool productivity software. The problem is actually finding the right one for the right task. I’ve bought a lot of them and I’m just now getting to know all of them and finding out which one works well for me.