AutoText Overview

Many times during the process of code writing you have probably used identical or similar blocks of code, or written the same instructions over and over. In such cases, an auto-text feature, like the one found in many professional text editors, could save you a lot of time, keeping you concentrated more on your program's logic. Typing a few letters or hitting a special key combination is much more productive than writing, from scratch, the same pieces of code, again and again. This is what the CodeSMART AutoText system was built to do in order to ease the process of coding, make it faster and therefore more efficient.

An auto-text item consists of:

• A block of Visual Basic code.
• An alias which usually represents a two or three character text. Once this text is typed into the Visual Basic code window and a special key like blank, enter, arrow keys etc. is pressed, it will be replaced with the auto-text's code.

orn		On Error Resume Next
- or -
mb		MsgBox("|")
- or -
if		If | Then End If

The "|" character stands for the cursor position.

• The code behind auto-text items is completely customizable.
• The auto-text item code can be enriched with standard parameters. Thus it can automatically update its contents based on the insertion context.
• In-place values for user-defined parameters are supported through custom parameters.
• The cursor position and even the selected text range, as a result of the insertion, can be precisely set.

To manage the auto-text items you can use the AutoText Manager. This is a special tool that allows the creation of new auto-text items, and the management of the existing ones (modification and removal) . Also, the auto-text items can be organized into folders, imported and exported, and a list of existing items and their associated triggers can be printed for later reference.

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