Productivity enhancing Software - Part II
This is Part II of the series. Today I'll cover following utilities:
English is not my native language, but I've gotten better with it over a period of time. My 3.5 yrs in US may have helped a lot in that respect. But I still I am unaware of a LOT of new words, that I come across. I think wordweb is a very good way to help with this problem.
You can highlight a word in ANY application and then invoke WordWeb using a hotkey. Default is Ctrl-Alt-W, but you can define other is you want. It also shows the phonetic spelling of the word in each context, helping you to prnounce it correctly as well.
I think best part I like about WW is that it is available all the time, even when one is NOT connected to internet. That is where it scores big time.
Note: While I was writing that you can use wordweb with ANY application, I realized that it didn't work with gvim7
Slickrun: The magical floating 'Run' bar
I have always been a UNIX person so to speak, because my career started working on Solaris. I have always used and worked on Windows machines as my primary workstation, but was always comfortable with command line and other UNIXy things like vi. In fact this entry is also being written in gvim 7.0, but more about gvim later.
So I do prefer and use windows "Run" bar to invoke various utilities from time to time, say calc, notepad etc. I came to know about SlickRun thru one of the Productivity websites,can't remember which one. I tried it and was hooked onto it instantly.
Slickrun as I mentioned, is a floating toolbar. One can defined a hotkey which will invoke this floating toolbar, that is the first way to reduct reduce the mouse click. Slickrun comes with set of predefined magicwords, and with the ability to define your own ones. magicwords are shortcuts for various frequently used programs that you need to invoke. It lets you customize the appearance, like the background of the flatong bar, the font size, colour etc.
Initially I added the most frequently used programs in the magicword list, and as and when notice myself using particular program frequently, I'll add it to the list.
New Magicword tab of Slickrun has one cool feature called a dropper. You can drag the dropper to a already running program and it will automatically grab the pathname. You can also pass parameters to the binary , and test the new magic word to see if everything works. Slickrun is not limited to invoking programs alone, it can let you open a folder as well.
One more feature I like is auto-completion. It works for the magicwords as well as for filenames. So invoking a frequently used program can take as less as two keystrokes. One Hotkey and then first alphabet of the magicword.
To be continued ....
- WordWeb: Offline dictionary
- SlickRun: The magical floating 'Run' bar
English is not my native language, but I've gotten better with it over a period of time. My 3.5 yrs in US may have helped a lot in that respect. But I still I am unaware of a LOT of new words, that I come across. I think wordweb is a very good way to help with this problem.
You can highlight a word in ANY application and then invoke WordWeb using a hotkey. Default is Ctrl-Alt-W, but you can define other is you want. It also shows the phonetic spelling of the word in each context, helping you to prnounce it correctly as well.
I think best part I like about WW is that it is available all the time, even when one is NOT connected to internet. That is where it scores big time.
Note: While I was writing that you can use wordweb with ANY application, I realized that it didn't work with gvim7
Slickrun: The magical floating 'Run' bar
I have always been a UNIX person so to speak, because my career started working on Solaris. I have always used and worked on Windows machines as my primary workstation, but was always comfortable with command line and other UNIXy things like vi. In fact this entry is also being written in gvim 7.0, but more about gvim later.
So I do prefer and use windows "Run" bar to invoke various utilities from time to time, say calc, notepad etc. I came to know about SlickRun thru one of the Productivity websites,can't remember which one. I tried it and was hooked onto it instantly.
Slickrun as I mentioned, is a floating toolbar. One can defined a hotkey which will invoke this floating toolbar, that is the first way to reduct reduce the mouse click. Slickrun comes with set of predefined magicwords, and with the ability to define your own ones. magicwords are shortcuts for various frequently used programs that you need to invoke. It lets you customize the appearance, like the background of the flatong bar, the font size, colour etc.
Initially I added the most frequently used programs in the magicword list, and as and when notice myself using particular program frequently, I'll add it to the list.
New Magicword tab of Slickrun has one cool feature called a dropper. You can drag the dropper to a already running program and it will automatically grab the pathname. You can also pass parameters to the binary , and test the new magic word to see if everything works. Slickrun is not limited to invoking programs alone, it can let you open a folder as well.
One more feature I like is auto-completion. It works for the magicwords as well as for filenames. So invoking a frequently used program can take as less as two keystrokes. One Hotkey and then first alphabet of the magicword.
To be continued ....
2 comments:
>> Note: While I was writing that
>> you can use wordweb with ANY
>> application, I realized
>> that it didn't work with gvim7
It works fine with gvim. Add this keymap to your vimrc file. Should be all on one line.
It's not letting me use angle brackets, so replace the parens below with angle brackets:
map (C-F7) :!start Rundll32 WWEB32.DLL,ShowRunDLL (cword)(CR)
Restart vim. When you press F7 WordWeb Pro will look up the word under the cursor.
Oops, make that Ctrl-F7 to look up word under cursor.
sorry
rd
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