Wanted: Online note taking tool with one specific feature

October 11, 2020 9:13 AM

I need a simple online note taking tool that lets me use shortcuts or autocorrect in a specific way. My hospital EMR has this neat feature that lets users define strings of characters (preceded by "\") that insert blocks of text that we previously created and stored in the system. I love this feature and would like to use something like this for my own note-taking outside the hospital.

Examples of what I am talking about: writing \ascites and pressing enter will automatically insert a few paragraphs that I wrote for my patients about living with ascites. Writing \yom and pressing enter produces "...year old male".

I would like to find an online note taking tool that lets me define a number of such shortcuts so I can take notes quickly in real time but have them appear as neat text. Does any note taking tool that you know let users do this?

It needs to be web-based and ideally not have many other features that would slow it down. Just plain text notes and auto-correct. Also, I exclusively use Windows if that matters.

posted by M. to Computers & Internet (19 answers total)

Response by poster: To clarify, I'd be using it on an old-ish laptop with a slow internet connection that won't let me install any new software so I cannot use Dragon Naturally Speaking or anything like that. I just need an online notepad with auto-replace.
posted by M. at 9:24 AM on October 11, 2020

You could use autohotkey to achieve. Very simple and very powerful. Let's you create a standalone program that doesn't need to be installed to do exactly what you've described. Bonus is it works acoss any software so you are free to use whatever note-taking method you want.
posted by chasles at 9:26 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I should probably also clarify that I do not have admin privileges on the laptop I will be using. This is for my other workplace where I use an old laptop. I cannot install anything and I do not know autohotkey but I assume I wouldn't be able to use it there even if I figured it out.

So really, I am looking for online note taking tools specifically.
posted by M. at 9:34 AM on October 11, 2020

Best answer: Not a specific note taking app, but what you're looking for is "text expansion." I use a google chrome extension called "Auto Text Expander for Google Chrome." I'm able to add this to chrome without admin privileges on my work machine.
posted by bluloo at 9:36 AM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

I understood the requirement, Autohotkey runs as a standalone executable. Apologies for the slightly lateral response.
posted by chasles at 9:53 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I use Autohotkey on a pretty locked-down work laptop. It might not be as locked down as *your* work laptop.

Keystroke expanders are a fertile field for software. There are editors that have their own internal implementation, and systemwide expanders like Autohotkey.
posted by adamrice at 10:00 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

You can define these macros in Word, too, but each reusable text snippet is limited to 255 characters.
posted by k3ninho at 10:56 AM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Bluloo is correct. You are looking for text expansion. Check out TextExpander (Windows, Mac, and Chrome) and Typinator (Mac). There are others out there.
posted by nrobertson at 11:09 AM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: While I appreciate people trying to be helpful, I am specifically asking for online notepads/ text editors and NOT macros, scripts or any sort of extension. I am not able to use them, I already tried.
posted by M. at 11:10 AM on October 11, 2020

I believe the reason you're getting alternative suggestions is because what you're looking for simply doesn't exist.

If you are willing to learn Javascript, you could write something for yourself that could be used in combination with an existing online note taking application.
posted by jaden at 7:12 PM on October 11, 2020

Can you tell us what "text" applications you have on your machine? You will have notepad, probably, which won't help, but if you have Notepad++, Word or other "advanced" text program you may be able to work within it to achieve this.

Otherwise, it would be fairly "straightforward" javascript as jaden suggests, though the "straightforward" part depends a lot of how much formatting is present in the text you wish to replace your shortcuts with...nothing is impossible, but line breaks, quotes, "oddball" characters and the like are all things which can make that a bit of an adventure.

This online site kind of does what you want...but the formatting of the replacement text looks like it will be inserted as a single block without line breaks, which means if you do want to swap "!bbb" with "blah blah (new paragraph) blah" you might have to do the paragraphs afterwards. Still, might be worth fooling with. Especially if the CSV version works, and you can edit CSVs on your computer. That would enable you to have a local "dictionary" you could upload rather than having to manually re-enter them each time.

I have no knowledge of the site I linked to...looks fairly legit, and nothing particularly egregious seems to be loading when examined with uMatrix, but I probably wouldn't be trying it out with personal finances or medical data, eh?

(I found that site by doing a google search for "online string replace"...you might be able to find more/better sites which offer similar services by starting with those terms.)
posted by maxwelton at 10:23 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: (Oh, and I suggest staying away from "\" as the special character to start your shortcuts. The backslash is used for escaping special characters and such, typically, and I can easily imagine the input tools on a free site not really anticipating backslashes...)
posted by maxwelton at 10:26 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have a friend who uses the software version of Word and sets up autocorrect to turn random character strings into much longer things. The actual dialog that lets you set things up is just a list of 'if you see this turn it into that' pairs. The default settings are things that change (c) into the copyright symbol and such, but you can remove the defaults and add as many other things as you like.

I don't know if the online version has the same feature, or even if Google docs has that feature, but searching around for autocorrect might help.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 10:51 PM on October 11, 2020

Response by poster: Can you tell us what "text" applications you have on your machine? You will have notepad, probably, which won't help, but if you have Notepad++, Word or other "advanced" text program you may be able to work within it to achieve this.

I have Notepad and WordPad.
No Word, no Notepad++.
Autocorrect would solve my problem, Find and replace does not - it just does not make sense if you're only "replacing" a lot of small chunks of text.
posted by M. at 12:27 AM on October 12, 2020

Looks like you can do this in google docs. In addition, it's worth checking whether autocorrect works in the free web version of Microsoft Word.
posted by oceano at 12:03 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Another thought... will your work machine accept a usb drive?
posted by oceano at 12:10 PM on October 12, 2020

Google Docs will work this way: Auto Text in GoogleDocs
posted by soelo at 8:34 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: UPDATE:

Thank you for all the suggestions!

After a lot more googling with various search terms you suggested it seems like there is indeed no online notepad with auto-correct but several other suggestions were interesting and might come in handy on my home computer.

Textexpander did not work properly with Firefox which I use at work and at home but works great with Opera on my niece's computer so it's definitely something I might use in the future.

Google Docs is a great suggestion even though the super slow internet connection at work makes it slightly less practical in my specific situation.

Autohotkey sounds cool but I just couldn't figure it out quickly enough and the online manual was not suited to the way my brain works. Same with Notepad++.

In the end, it turned out the work laptop did actually have Word - not sure how and when it got installed since it definitely wasn't there last time I looked. This ended up being the simplest and fastest solution as I could write all my notes in Word and then paste it into the clunky EMR. [Online WORD versions do not seem to have this feature BTW].

I have given up on the idea of ever learning to write even the simplest code so there's that.

All in all, I ended up saving quite a bit of time writing today's notes, so thank you!
posted by M. at 12:20 PM on October 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: A follow-up to announce I just came across a beautiful new solution in a recent AskMe thread:

Espanso

Tried it out and it works beautifully.
Big thanks to yerfatma!
posted by M. at 11:24 AM on June 13, 2021