Lightkey – Free Basic Edition. This offers the LightkeyPad text editor with smooth predictive (autocomplete) text, and the editor learns rapidly as you type. The paid version works with Microsoft Office 2010 (and higher) and the Google Chrome Web browser.
But the free version of Lightkey seems fine, albeit after a download and install that seemed to take aeons. There’s also a direct download link for the .exe here, for those who want offline installs. Assume you’ll be spending a while on getting it down, and then installed and up and running. But once you finally get out the other side of that slough, and the profile-building, LightkeyPad turns out to be a pleasing simple text editor with fluid predictive auto-typing and some light-touch spelling/grammar correction.
Initially I thought it was not very British, as it wanted to offer Stanford for “Stoke-on-Trent”, but it can do the county name “Staffordshire” out of the box. And type “Stoke-on-Trent” a few times and it even gets the hang of that. As such, it’s not necessary to manually set up a personal configuration file of words. It seems the software will learn those as it goes along.
It can even cope with “Lovecraft” after you type his name a few times. “Cthulhu”, too. Four times seems to be the usual times you type a new word before the software “knows” it. It can’t correct “If can’t” to “It can’t”. Nor can it autoclose HTML tags, leaving you to add the URL and title in the middle.
If you find this freeware useful will rather depend on what sort of typist you are. Do you look down at the keyboard as you type with two fingers, or look at the screen while ‘typing blind’? That will also partly depend on when you type, as typing in low light is not so easy either way (unless perhaps you have a snazzy gamer keyboard where the letters glow-in-the-dark).
The user presses the Tab key on the keyboard to confirm a suggested word, and doing this rapidly becomes easy and reflexive.
There’s no post-typing spell-check or grammar checker to run over the entire finished text, and such things happen as you type. There is a word-count for the finished text, which is handy, but the final pass of spellchecking then needs to be done on pasting the text into Word or WordPress. I’m guessing there may be a one-click “send to Word” button in the Pro version of LightkeyPad.
There’s a ‘dark mode’ done in nice midnight-blues, that’s easily accessed via a big button. The icons on the top bar are neat and pleasing.
The software saves to .TXT or .RTF format.
What would improve it?
* A simple search-replace would be welcome, but I guess that would mess with the usefulness of the typing and word analysis. A “Select all” menu item is also curiously missing.
* It needs to save its configuration. On launch it doesn’t remember the window height, or the chosen font from the previous session. (It’s possible to work around the font problem by saving a “template.RTF” with one’s chosen font set up, and then having a Windows Startup link to that file and thus launch Lightkey. That’s not ideal, but it works. Lightkey also insists on saving to My Documents every time, instead of to the last save location.
* Loading time could be a touch quicker, as it’s not as instant as Notepad. But if you launch it at Windows Startup, as suggested above, then it’s already open and is as quick to spring into action as Notepad is.
* I disliked its Taskbar ‘hidden icons’ panel icon, which — being slightly slanted — looks ugly and jaggy (because it’s not being aliased). On closer inspection, however, this turns out to be the LightKey Control Center .exe, this having been launched as a silent Startup launch, and it’s not LightkeyPad. As such, simply Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to the Windows Startup services tab and from there disable the LightKey Control Center permanently. The LightkeyPad editor doesn’t appear to need it in order to work.
What about privacy? It does create a profile based on your “recent documents”, but there is an optional scan of these at the install point, and…
“the user’s documents and emails, along with their typing data, will NOT be sent or collected by Lightkey’s servers in any way, as they are the user’s private property.”
But some sort of unique cumulative hash from the “typing data” may be being sent, and as such you’ll want to install offline and then uncheck this item ASAP…
It also learns from your typing, so that unique word/keystroke record is presumably being stored somewhere on your PC. That’s potentially a valuable ‘fingerprint’, from which things like business secrets might be somehow reconstructed. In which case a firm won’t want such data slipping out of the user’s PC and being sent off to Whereizitagin. I’m not suggesting any malfeasance here on the part of the makers, but just that you need to be sure that such a local file — if it exists — is truly secure.
Overall LightKey is an interesting development in genuine freeware, and even out-of-the-box it’s not as annoying as you might think an auto-complete text editor would be. I loathe always-wrong Web search auto-complete as much as the next user, but this software does auto-complete and substitutions quite nicely and gets in the way as little as possible. As such I think I have a new first-draft composition Notepad replacement here, and will try it as a replacement for a few weeks.
Desktop alternatives?
* The free Notepad++ can do some Auto Completion natively, albeit via a method that’s not changed in over a decade and in a fiddly-looking way that’s aimed at coders. It can even do autoclose, with the help of several coder-focussed plugins. There’s also the Presage plugin for Notepad++, though that was last updated in 2015. There is what looks like a Presage Windows standalone, but it actually seems like it just runs a service at Windows startup that’s required by the Notepad++ plugin.
* If you really need the search-replace in similar free software, PredictEd 1.1 is open source freeware from 2018 and similar to Lightkey. But it’s very basic in design and far more clunky in its method.
* Predictive Tab Key Auto Complete for Chrome browsers. Again, free, and the only somewhat-recent one on the Chrome store. Not updated since 2015, and it’s about as annoying as you’d expect when composing a WordPress blog post. Very very fast, but not accurate and doesn’t appear to learn in any way I could discern. It would be great to see something like this that could be constrained only to a list of user-defined words and phrases (see Auto Text Expander below), but this doesn’t appear to be it.
* Windows? Well, Apparently Windows 10 has a “Show text suggestions as I type” setting in Windows, but I have no idea if it’s more than ‘Microsoft Clippy reborn’.
* In Word, one can set up custom autocorrects: select Word Options | ‘Proofing’ | ‘AutoCorrect Options’ | ‘Replace Text as you type’. #h can be set to autocorrect to href, for instance. The free LibreOffice apparently offers AutoCorrect that works with words longer than eight letters, and can be similarly customised. But who wants to launch either of these lumbering behemoths, just to do what should be done in Notepad?
* Paid? the $130 Typing Assistant 8.x works with any Windows software and Web browsers, does what is says, is 64-bit and developed. Which is presumably why it’s so expensive. The old 32-bit abandonware Smart Type Assistant for Windows is similar and is now free.
There are also paid ‘abbreviation managers/expanders’ like PhraseExpress and Breevy and FastFox, but they are: i) expensive and mostly way too complicated for such a simple task; and ii) rely on you being able to remember the abbreviation, or to remember to place a # in front of the start of a word, or which letter to stop at to trigger the expansion without overtyping. ShortKeys Lite is a rather ancient and very clunky free choice here, and there are a couple of equally ancient Notepad++ plugins whose makers used descriptions such as ‘snippet’ and ‘substitution’.
Similar Web browser addons are ProKeys, Auto Text Expander and Text Blaze (beta). Also the right-click Paste Email.
All these are useful for adding your signature, email addresses and boilerplate text, but in practice are not so useful for composing ‘in the flow’.