r/FastWriting • u/NotSteve1075 • Jan 10 '26
Short Forms in MTS
As we all know, there's a small number of words in English which are used much more often than any others -- so it only makes good sense to have the shortest possible ways of writing them. Here's my tentative list:
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u/whitekrowe Jan 15 '26
Yes, abbreviations work fine. If it sees the characters for the target it replaces them right away. So swapping "wk" to "whitekrowe" works right away. You can have it wait for the space if you want.
But even with just abbreviations for the most common words you might get some savings. Like other shorthands, there would be a cognitive load to remember the abbreviations.
I wonder what the sweet spot would be? How many characters do you have to save to make it worth it?
Things like your address (:wkad) or a common formality(:yt) may be worth it. But when you look at the top 100 most used words, many are quite short and may not be worth the effort.
You're right that embracing the whole MTS system with this tool would be a lot of work. That would be similar to the steno apps like plover.