Faster Snippets: The Edit Snippets Interface and Commonly Used Actions

Faster Snippets can be a huge time saver if you do a lot with your keyboard repeatedly, but before we can use our snippets we have to create them.  Let’s start by familiarizing ourselves with the Edit Snippets interface.

We can get to the Edit Snippets interface by going to Faster Suite on the Faster Ribbon, clicking the settings wheel, then Text Snippets on the left and Custom Libraries across the top.

On this screen, clicking the pencil icon next to “Use my custom text snippets with Faster Snippets” will launch the snippet editor.

This window is split into three panels.  On the left we will see any snippets we configure and can create new snippets or folders with the plus button.  We can also right-click anything here to see some options like Delete or Export.

The middle panel is where we will edit our snippets once they are created.  Selecting any snippet on the left will open that snippet in the middle panel.

On the right we can find any field in Clio that we would like to populate into the expanded text of a snippet.

For now let’s create a new snippet and look at the most commonly used actions in Faster Snippets.  We can click the plus button and select New Snippet to get started.  We’ll see that a snippet is created with some generic information.

The first thing we should do is configure a description and abbreviation for this snippet.  We recommend always using a special character or number in the abbreviation so the snippet only activates when we intend to activate it.  If we only use letters in our abbreviation, we might accidentally activate the snippet when we’re typing normally.

Now we can begin adding actions to the snippet.  New snippets will have one action already configured, we can delete this action by clicking the settings wheel to the right and selecting “Delete this action”.

Next let’s add some common actions by clicking the “Add Another Action” button.  We can see that snippet actions are organized into three categories, Text, Keyboard, and Advanced Actions.  The most common actions are Type Text under Text Actions, and Press Keys and Use a Keyboard Shortcut under Keyboard Actions.  Let’s add all three to our snippet.

Notice that these actions appear as blocks.  This means we can delete individual actions, temporarily turn specific actions on or off, and rearrange actions by dragging them.

Anything that we type in this field will be automatically entered the way we type it here when we activate the snippet.  Notice that we can hit Enter or Tab on our keyboard in this field to make new lines or indent our expanded text.

We can also enter some Clio tags to automatically pull information from a matter in Clio.  We’ll cover this in more detail later, but for now let’s expand the Matter folder and double click the “Description” field to copy the tag to our clipboard, then paste it into our Type Text action using the right-click option or by pressing Control+V.

Now when we activate this snippet, we will be prompted to select a matter and Faster Snippets will automatically fill in the Matter Description of the selected matter.

To tell Faster Snippets to press a button on our keyboard, we can just enter the name of the button and select it from the drop-down.  We’ll see a button icon appear with the name of the key we’re pressing.

Both keyboard actions will be configured with the same process, but each works just a little bit differently.  Press keys will hit any keys on your keyboard you select in the sequence you enter them, and keyboard shortcuts will hit all keys entered simultaneously, like Control S or Alt U.

When we’re done configuring our snippet, we can click Save on the Edit Snippets window, and we must also be sure to click Save and Close on the Settings window to permanently store our new snippet.  Once we’ve done this, we can go into any application on our computer and type the abbreviation to activate the snippet.