I’ve been ranting on and on about how I love Notepad++, and recently I’ve started looking ore and more at, let me share a cool feature I found which lets you create keyboard shortcuts for pasting anything really. This helps my productivity to no end, especially when writing html or css code.

I use comments a lot when first creating a design so I know where I am later on too. Creating a comment in html means you have to write the following code <!-- Comment Here -->. This can get a bit tedious, especially at the beginning, when I add a comment below all my div containers, and also at their closing tag. For this reason I created a macro to paste comment tags quickly.

In Notepad++, just go to the macro menu and choose start recording. Tye the desired text anywhere on screen, in my example I wrote <!-- -->, and then go to the macro menu again, and click stop recording. You will need to go to the menu again and click “save currently recorded macro”. You can now set the key combination for it, I use a combination of the control and shift key, plus a letter usually.

Here’s a quick tip to productivize yourself (making new words is great). If you use Firefox, use the bookmark organizer (Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks) to add a keyword to a bookmarked site. If you frequently use Google Reader you can just type “r” into the address bar, press enter and there you are, here’s how.

Once you’re in the organizer right-click on an entry, click on properties and find the field entitled “keyword”. Type something memorable in there, like “hyd” for Hack Your Day, and from then on if you type “hyd” in the address bar and press enter, you will be magically teleported to the blog.