Ben Brooks recently sent the following Tweet requesting a .com button for his Mac. Considering how many times a day I hit those four keys, it seemed like a damn good idea.
Thankfully this was fairly easy to accomplish and now my Mac has a .com key of its own. Actually, it has two, one in Keyboard Maestro and another in TextExpander. The first is a bit more programmer friendly, but requires that you hit two keys at the same time. The second requires a single keystroke, but won’t work for anyone who codes.
Keyboard Maestro – This should work for anyone in any situation. Create a new Macro under the hot key command-. and have it paste in “.com”. Keep in mind that you can set your own hot key.
It should look exactly like this:
TextExpander – While this won’t work for anyone who uses the back tick to write code, it should suffice for those of us who have never, ever used the key. This one is even easier, just create a snippet that replaces ` with .com. Here is what it should look like:
One small thing to keep in mind, you need to make sure that the group settings for whatever folder the TextExpander snippet lives in is set to expand after “Any Character”.
While saving three characters might be a silly example, it is kind of nice to have a .com key on my Mac and this same concept could easily be applied to anything you can imagine.
Update: Ben took this a step further and modified the the Keyboard Maestro macro to only work in Safari. Nice touch!