"For" was on the F key, "Next" was on the N key - made for pretty fast typing once you got used to it. Okay, I've been trying to control my inner lecturer but

"For" was on the F key, "Next" was on the N key - made for pretty fast typing once you got used to it. Okay, I've been trying to control my inner lecturer but now I'm just going to come out and say it: You need to learn emacs. The features you're describing have been built into my text editor for years, and they could be yours today! (Cue the dancing girls and the fabulous music!) The emacs term for a feature that turns a key sequence like "f <TAB>" into "for" is snippets. Check out this screencast demo of the YASnippets package: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOj7btx3ATg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOj7btx3ATg I don't really use snippets myself (although the screencast might inspire me to try again). I find that autocompleting "for" is not very interesting, because I can type it really fast. What I do use all the time is hippie-expand: http://badbyteblues.blogspot.com/2007/12/hippie-expand-and-autocompletion-in.html http://badbyteblues.blogspot.com/2007/12/hippie-expand-and-a... I have that bound to a special key of my own, so that I can continue to use TAB for other purposes like intelligent code indenting. With hippie-expand I rarely type the same symbol name twice. The first time it's "drupal_set_message", but after that it's just "dru" followed by one to five keypresses to scroll through the options. The other thing I'm just bursting to say is: you need to learn to type. Touch typists do not care about key caps that change their labels. We don't look at the keys. I can't type 80 WPM while looking at the keys. I've met typists who type Dvorak on QWERTY keyboards, for whom looking at the keys would break their typing. My own keyboard has an "End" key that's actually Escape, an Escape key that's actually Caps Lock, a Page Down key that functions as Page Up if you hold down shift, Page Up and Home keys that are actually Option... (Hint: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage_pro.htm http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage_pro.htm).