It is a pleasure to e-meet you all.
This is my first post, so I hope I won't violate any good practices
.I am currently evaluating the trial version of FastKeys for the use of our small team. Two users to start with and possibly more in the future.
Since some years till now we have been using some other advanced text expander tool but due to:
- high pricing in a subscription model
- clunkiness of some solutions
- a bit of slow performance at times
- very basic synchronization capabilities for the team sharing that can lead to database conflicts
- poor license management for multiple users (e.g. once a license is provided to a user, there is no controllable way to unassigning such a license from that user other than just relying on their honesty to not use the license anymore)
we decided to look around for alternate expander solutions. In short, encountering FastKeys gave me a lot of how:
- reasonable pricing without subscription
- a lot of useful features, some of them even beyond what we know from the currently used by us expander tool
- easy to follow logic and well documented online with the great quality video tutorials - great job on this one!
- simple but effective (at least on paper) small team sharing features
- well organized forum for gathering issues/ideas and interact with the community - from what I saw so far both the community and the modders feel kind and supportive - it is a pleasure to join such working environment
- and there are so many more positives I could list here, in other words, by no means my intention with this post is to complain or disregard the great job the FK team does on their tool.
Now, with some initial experience under my belt, I would kindly share with you some of the things I see that prevent me from deciding on FK to become a valid replacement to our current expander tool. Here are some issues / missing functionalities in no particular order:
1. Maximize button is grayed out, and the window is very small. Adjusting the window manually is limited to some degree (I can't resize it to the full screen) and it is reset after the app relaunches. Also, the manual resize of the window does not allow columns with the data to follow the resize - it happens randomly - so even though there is a lot of space within the window the first column with strings does not display their full content for a bit longer strings. A manual way to readjust the column width could be of help here.
2. Editing Shared settings requires closing the app. When one user does some edits, the other user has to relaunch the app in order to see them.
3. Left Ctrl can't be set as a trigger key (the one that expands the phrase) - It would be great to have this key as an option. Maybe just a habit on my end as we constantly use this key to trigger the text expansions with the current tool, but at least I have never noticed that L Ctrl interferes with any text field/editor that we work with. TAB and ENTER (which are available as trigger keys) interfere with Notepad++ (possibly with other programs, but I haven't checked thoroughly). What I mean here is that both the TAB and ENTER keys do not execute the selected phrase from FK correctly - they either come out broken (only parts of them appear) or they don't come out at all.
4. No EN nor PL spellchecker for text fields within the app. Being a PL native speaker, it is important for me to be able to spellcheck the entries within the expander tool while I type them in. This greatly speeds up the work and makes it free of mistakes. I am even more surprise that there is not even EN spellchecker available.
5. Trigger words can't contain spaces. I needed to use the underscore. Not sure what this is the case, but whenever I have tried to set a string (a trigger string) with a space, FK did not process this phrase at all. I found no instruction on the need to avoid some characters (like a space) while creating those string entries - I simply guessed it and used the underscores instead, it worked. The problem that I see here is that while typing in such a string, I would never (in my daily use) type in the underscores - I would simply drop a space. The lack of support for spaces in string or the tool being able to interpret spaces as underscores while typing them naturally in the flow of text breaks productivity, at least from my perspective. Important comment: please note that contrary to the usual convention of using some abstract abbreviations for trigger strings, we use full words or phrase as these are very natural to type in when we need them in a given context, and they barely require any "remembering about them". Here is an example:
Instead of
(trigger) string: BR
for
Best Regards
we would very much prefer to use the following
(trigger) string: best regards
as this is exactly what we will be typing anyway and as you can see there won't be any underscore in-between to interrupt the usual flow of the text.
6. Clipboard history size only 30 entries, while the clipboard menu is limited only to 9 recent entries. Just to compare - at this moment, I have looked up how many entries I have in my clipboard from today within our current tool = 228 entries (these get removed once I close the program as by the relevant setting - this can be changed) and all of them can be accessed by me through a clipboard menu and even searched through this menu.
7. Limited User Variables. Not sure why I can't add any more variables. Here is a scenario these are useful to us. We produce many project email templates with some data that is predefined for a given client but can change periodically. The idea is to have for example 20 email templates and within them some pre-defined variables that display the same value, e.g. a version of a tool needed to work in a given project. However, after 3 months the version of the tool gets updated, and we would need to update all those 20 email templates one by one - to prevent that, we would just update this pre-defined variable in a single place so all those email templates would receive this change. With the limited user variables, I can easily see that we will run out of our options soon.
8. UI button cut-off in Preferences menu. There is a question mark icon in the upper right corner and right next to it there is some partially visible button but the rest of it is cut-off. As there is no way for me to resize this Preference window, I can't even tell what this button is for.
9. Move left/right option, grayed out for a tab that is placed after the shared tabs. When a local tab is placed to the right of shared tab and I right-click the local tab, a menu pops up but the move left/right options are grayed out.
10. Clicking X button minimizes to tray. I can't find an option in the settings that would simply allow me to hit the X button to actually close FK.
11. New entries added to the Shared tabs appear only after the window minimizes and displays back again. Not sure why this happens, but every time I add an entry to a shared tab, the window disappears and reappears again.
12. The usual Ctrl + B or Ctrl + I formatting shortcuts don't work in rich text - icons need to be pressed. Clicking is slow and not being able to use such common shortcuts in a text editor, especially in a productivity tool is a bit disappointing.
13. Can't add hyperlinks in the Rich Text editor. This we do a lot - nicely formatted emails with linked documentation etc. I went with an HTML workaround, but it was very slow to produce such a template, and I can't expect every user to know HTML enough to create/update such templates in case of a need.
14. In Rich Text I can't edit an inserted Macro by double-clicking it. It works only for one-word named macros.
%INPUT_Person% - double-clicking works correctly (brings up the edit window for editing the macro)
%DATETIME_Delivery_Date% - double-clicking brings up the edit window, but it is a new macro window, not the edit window for the current macro
15. Preview form not available for Rich Text. This is a very handy feature that we use constantly with the current tool. FK seems to have a simplified preview, but it only works for plain text and HTML entries, none of which we use very often (in fact the HTML one we don't use at all).
16. Rich Text templates not inserted correctly into MS Word (missing background color), Thunderbird (zero formatting - all formatting is gone), Google Docs (zero formatting). Again, the Rich Text seems severely underdeveloped in FK.
17. Optional Selection and many more options not working in Rich Text and HTML - grayed out. It seems the main focus of FK is the plain text entries - these have all the functionalities advertised for the tool and presented in the video tutorials, while RT and HTML are missing many of those.
18. HTML not inserted correctly into MS Word (missing background color).
19. What does Enterprise edition provide, especially in terms of sharing with team members? Can it be launched for 2 users? If yes, on what cost? The professional edition relies on cloud sharing which is OK - it is what we use currently. This would be enough for us if FK would provide:
- a simple way to share, edit, update, remove etc. shared entries - now it feels cumbersome with the need to restart full app after introducing any edits to the shared entries
- real-time sharing - no significant lag / app restart needed as is the current state
- easy way of resolving file conflicts if any occur - right now, when I did an edit test on one PC and the edit on the same entry on the other PC some data (introduced by one of the users) was lost
Till now these are the main things I have observed. Thank you for taking the time to read this long post. If you see any misusage/misinterpration of the FK's functionalities please let me know and instruct me on how these issues can be resolve. Otherwise please let me know if you plan on fixing/adding any of the above and if yes in what time horizon more or less. Thank you very much for creating such a valid tool alternative - great potential
