Parenting and Realm Works

[daplunk]

Hi Team,

So I have 2 kids that absolutely love to sit on me at pretty much every opportunity. I'm prepping like mad to try get Storm King's Thunder entered in time for our new session to start and I find myself frustrated trying to enter data in with one hand.

It's a unique problem i know haha. But it got me thinking about what I could do to make myself more productive while managing to hold a sleeping baby in one hand.

Gaming Keyboards - I have a Logitech G19. Has a heap of those G keys that most people tend to forget about. I made 2x macros that have so far sped me up, not just while wrestling a toddler with one hand but it's also speeding me up in general. Using these keys I can trigger common commands with a single keystroke.

This is the paste as unformatted text as a single paragraph macro
Macro (Ctrl down, Alt down, V down, V up, Alt up, Ctrl up, Enter down, Enter up)

This is the Remove Empty Snippets and Sections macro.
Macro (Ctrl down, Shift down, ` down, ` up, Shift up, Ctrl up, Enter down, Enter up)

Does anyone have other tips for speeding up data entry? Particularly for 1 handed data entry?

[Vargr]

Well, for starters - good idea. I will look into programming my Razer gamekeypad tomorrow and see what I can make.

(Why didn't I think of this??)

[MNBlockHead]

Voice commands and dictation software. You'll want a good headset so ambient noise and kiddy babble doesn't interfere. I don't use it as much as I should. In the past, when my RSI was really bad I used Dragon Naturally Speaking for awhile.

I've not tested Cortana in Windows 10 much for this.

To use voice commands efficiently in RW, however, I think I would need to spend a lot of time customizing voice macros. I am not generally composing lots of text at one shot when in RW. I'm jumping all over the place moving things around and cutting and pasting.

[DaFranker]

I use an AutoIt script to cobble together similar macros, here's some of those I use:

Win+V: The same "unformatted text as single paragraph" paste.

Optionally uses a custom text replacer to find&replace ligature special characters or, in my particular case, the bugged-up false ligature characters in the fonts used in the Shadowrun 4th edition PDFs.

Ctrl+Shift+S: Create new custom section below the current one. Basically goes: F8, Down, Right, Down, Right, Enter.

Ctrl+Shift+D: Create new custom subsection inside the current one. Goes just like above, but it's the menu option just under it: F8, Down, Right, Down, Down, Right, Enter.

Ctrl+Shift+E: Reveal everything. F7, Down x 8, Right, Enter. I wanted E or T so that I could quickly Ctrl+Shift+R (Reveal/Hide Topic, default shortcut in RW) and then reveal all snippets, since I often tend to go on big sprees of data entry and forget to reveal any of it, and lots of it turns out to be stuff the PCs would already know. Ctrl+Shift+T turned out to be extra gymnastics and the tiny amount of extra strain adds up when you use this 20-30 times in the same hour.

I also have other scripts to automate creation and entry of whole new topics or articles, putting everything in and then moving on to the next one, but that's not something you can do with keyboard macros and it's not a script I can just compile and share with everyone, there's a couple manual steps of "minimal configuration and tweaking" to do for 'em to work.

I mostly use those automated scripts for things that are numerous and similar, don't need much detail, but that I still want to have as entries in there. For example, the myriad endless guns, spells, qualities/feats and powers/features you find in any large pre-existing setting.

[daplunk]

Love the reveal all that could be handy when entering lots of mechanics.