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Last active August 29, 2015 14:16
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Automating the Scalzi "Standard Responses to Online Stupidity"

I thought [John Scalzi's proposed list of responses to online stupidity] (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/03/02/standard-responses-to-online-stupidity/) were good but the prosepct of typing them in every time, or copying and pasting them from his site? Fuggedaboutit.

So why not turn to what was meant for this sort of thing? Textexpander! Just create a vanilla snippet and use the popup menu code to make it easy to pick from the list. It's pretty simple to format things this way but I saved you the trouble.

Just copy and paste the (long) line below into a new text expander snippet, plain text style. Assign whatever shortcut you like. I used scalzinope since I already had a nope snippet, but whatever floats your boat.

%fillpopup:name=NopeChoice:default=I don’t care what you think.:I didn’t ask you.:No doubt you thought that was terribly clever.:You’ve attempted logic. Not all attempts succeed.:One should not have that many errors in that few characters.:Either your educators have failed you, or you have failed them.:I see you’ve invited me to an argument. I decline.:It appears an asshole has hacked your account and is posting in your name.:Funny, most people go out of their way not to be a public bigot.:Cosplaying as a tantrum-throwing child is no way to go through life.:I’m sorry that you are so obviously scared of the world.:My attention is a privilege, not a right. This is all you get.%

Now when you activate that snippet you'll get a popup with a box you can pick one of those from. It's nicely keyboard navigable so you can just arrow to the one you want and press enter.

It doesn't actually have to be one line; if you put a carriage return before or after the semicolon that separates the lines it'll be easier to read in the edit window and will still work fine. But the helpful editor doesn't display quite right then. Here's a readable version so you can see how TextExpander does this and how little I needed to add.

%
fillpopup:name=NopeChoice:
default=I don’t care what you think.:
I didn’t ask you.:
No doubt you thought that was terribly clever.:
You’ve attempted logic. Not all attempts succeed.:
One should not have that many errors in that few characters.:
Either your educators have failed you, or you have failed them.:
I see you’ve invited me to an argument. I decline.:
It appears an asshole has hacked your account and is posting in your name.:
Funny, most people go out of their way not to be a public bigot.:
Cosplaying as a tantrum-throwing child is no way to go through life.:
I’m sorry that you are so obviously scared of the world.:
My attention is a privilege, not a right. This is all you get.
%

You can add your own in there, with the lone restriction that that can't include colons or percent signs, since TextExpander reserves those as its own seperators. I default to the very first item but you can move that default= to any line and that'll be the one that comes up. Maybe you want to put it in the middle so you can scroll more quickly up OR down? Go nuts.

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