Autoreplace, You Say? Yes, I Say!

About a month ago, I was digging around in the registry for something, (I forget what it was now) and I found a very interesting registry key for Live Writer. I was intrigued as this offered a great feature for Writer. I played about with it for a bit and got this mysterious [undocumented] feature working.

As you can gather from the title of this post, it’s an Autoreplace feature. So, with no UI in the current Writer versions for this feature, I decided to hack together something of my own:

This feature works in the same was as the autoreplace you see in Word, replacing the words as you type them in the editor. You can download the plugin from my skydrive area, then just drop it into your plugins folder. In Writer, you will see this:

Just click on that and you will get the above screen. From there you can add what you want to replace and with what. Now, as the plugin states, these changes will take effect next time Live Writer is restarted. Once you have restarted Live Writer, then you should be good to go.

*****DISCLAIMER*****
This feature is unsupported by the Live Writer team and by me. All I am providing is a UI for this feature. The Live Writer team may very well get rid of this feature all together in a future release, making this plugin redundant. If they do, this is called a “chin up” situation!
*****END DISCLAIMER*****

Just as a note, it has been found that this feature may not be present in non-English versions of Live Writer/Windows. Would love to hear if anyone gets it working when they have a combination of non-English Live Writer or non-English Windows. The scenario we have seen so far is English Live Writer on an Italian version of Vista.

SL

Whilst writing this, I was listening to Girls Aloud – Live In The Country