I think we can all agree that acronyms save time but they come with the disadvantage of making text more difficult to read (depending on the acronym) and make it difficult for beginners to get into the topic. This seems to be especially a problem with lucid dreaming where they seem to have become a kind of social currency. With a little bit of setup we can get the advantage of both using a tool called autohotkey and it even works for text speak and basically any kind of abbreviation or shortening (it can even correct some misspelling). Note: this might look a little technical but trust me it's not that hard (I have taught my 9 year old brother to do this)
Autohotkey is actually a extremely versatile tool for productivity but we will only be using one of its features called hotstrings that will detect when you type some text and automatically replace that text. This can be used for many things not just acronyms like "rc" to "reality check" and "u" to "you" but it also works to correct common misspellings or errors for example I use it to auto capitalise "i" to "I". It is quite smart and will try to only change text when it is surrounded by spaces or punctuation though if you find you want it to not trigger press back arrow and the forward arrow before adding a space after the shortening.
Step one: Install autohotkey from https://www.autohotkey.com/
If your worried about its authenticity look it up on google it even has a wikipedia page. Only download it off the official site as I can not ensure other sources are safe. Step two:
On your desktop or in a folder right click, click new and click AutoHotKey script. Step three:
Right click the script, click open with and click notepad. It will open and there will be a bunch of text at the top but you can just ignore this and leave it where it is. Step four:
Add your acronymes. These are formatted like this:
::acronym::full unabbreviated text so as an example:
::rc::reality checkput each of these on their own line.
Step five:
Save the script in notepad and then double click it to run.
Note: every time you change the script you will have to run it again. It may throw up a warning about multiple instances just click ok it's not a problem. Tips:
Get creative with your uses. You can replace misspellings and use text speak in all of your writing to save time. For example I'm using it while typing this and it is replacing "u" with "you" and "ur" with "your". If you ever need turn it off it has an icon in the right of the taskbar (you may need to click the up arrow) and right clicking it will provide some options. If your the technical type you can look into further autohotkey functionality on their website https://www.autohotkey.com/
Not all acronyms are made to be expanded. Please do not expand WILD and DILD as they are long and cumbersome to read though you can replace things like "DEILD" with "dream reentry".
This will not work on smartphones though I'm pretty sure there are other ways to do this on them. Unfortunately I can not help you with that as I do not use a smartphone. Hope this can improve your productivity and the clarity of your writing. If you need any help post it in the replies and I will try to help but I'm usually not very active on the forum so sorry if I take a while.
Great post, thank you Finley!