Hi,

The Quick Entry features of using the @#^&! characters is MOST helpful.

However, for us rapid typists, having to type in up to 5 different symbol characters actually can be slower than typing in a short sequence of regular characters due to not breaking the flow of only short-distance finger movements of the most common keys (this has been demonstrated scientifically) As such, typing in something like

time:Someday

can actually be much faster than having to type in

^Someday

I think it would be a most useful feature, for example, if BOTH "^Someday" and "time:Someday" could be used in quick entry, and would behave identically (i.e., typing in "time:" brings up the pop-up list of time groups, just as it does now after typing in '^'). More specifically, I am asking that the following keywords typed in followed by a colon, that is:

"context:", "project:", "time:", "tag:", and "priority:"

(without the double quotes) act just like the following characters:

@#^&!

(respectively), when typed in the Quick Entry bar.

Of course, this changes your parser for the quick entry notably, and would need to be locale specific (i.e., time: in English, zeit: in German, etc.). It's easy to find a leading or white-spacing following symbol in a character string, no escapes are needed, so the parsing is simple, and is not locale-specific. Put differently, parsing the colon character (:) surrounded by non-whitespace and a small set of words on the left hand side (LHS; context|project|time|tag|priority for English) is also not hard, but does need an escape character for when people actually want something like "time:monday" in their task name (e.g., perhaps \: would be fine for this rare case), and the parser could no longer be locale-independent (presuming at the moment it is, which I suspect is the case).

So, I understand that this is a non-trivial change, but also not a terrible hard one, nor one that would impact performance, as it can and should be client-side. (If the actual parsing of quick entries is not already client side, then the client-side can just map say "time:" to "^" before submitting to the server.)

I just wanted to get it on your radar. Hopefully it can be something implemented in the not-too-distant future. I'd be a big plus for us rapid typers, especially in the context of GTD.

Thanks,
Doug