###The situation
There are certain expansions that to my mind are generic. Ever since I was taking notes at school I have used a shorthand whereby I substitute the suffix -ation with just n, so:
organizn > organization
compiln > compilation
…and so on.
###The idea
It seemed to me that this would be one situation where KBM may have more to offer than TextExpander (I happily run both on my system) simply because I could create a generic macro that uses Regex.
What I have for the moment is this trigger: [^aeiou]n[\h.,;:-]
The idea is that any word that finishes with a consonant ([^aeiou] in regex) and n is caught by this trigger, which then:
- executes two deletions; and
- inserts the text: ation.
Just for completeness, and the uninitiated, the [\h.,;:-] represents ‘a non-word character’ and is there to catch the word ending, whether it be a comma, space, full stop (period) or whatever. (Note that I did try using \W and this fell down with the word doesn’t.)
###Confession
The real regex is actually this [^aeiouw]n[\h.,;:-] because of words like down, own and grown…
###What I’d like to improve
So far so good. Except that as things stand, I am losing my non-word character (my macro obviously deletes it along with the n) because I can’t quite see how I might catch it and re-use it.
I did try to use a left-arrow keystroke, except that seems to be a problem because I think KBM is ever-so-slightly behind me as I continue typing away.
What I think I need to do is to capture the character represented by the [\h.,;:-] and have it pasted after the ‘ation’ element.
Is that possible?
###Other issues
Although it serves my purposes very well, there are (inevitably) exceptions for words such as appropriation where my system doesn’t work because the -ation element is preceded by a vowel.
###Beyond
There are other suffixes which could have the same treatment - for example using a g which would expand to the suffix -ing.