Ofaco

I recently had the opportunity to try out Mail, a classic Cocoa application that's a standard part of Mac OS X. One of the features that caught my attention was the text completion function, a lifesaver for fast typers like myself. With Mail, all you have to do is hit either F5 or Esc to bring up a list of possible word completions based on what you've already typed.

However, as I soon discovered, there was a bit of a downside. Apparently, one of the OS X updates (I believe it was one of the 10.4.x versions) changed the way Mail's text completion worked. Rather than using the words from the message you were typing in, Mail now pulls from the system dictionary instead.

This change meant that instead of speeding up my typing, the completion feature actually slowed me down. I had to scroll through an endless list of words before finally locating the one I wanted. And if you're writing in a different language than your system's default, forget about it - the feature is essentially useless.

Enter Ofaco, a plugin I discovered for Mail that changes everything. The name stands for Old-fashioned completion and it does exactly what it says. Ofaco replaces Mail's system dictionary-based completion with a feature that uses words directly from the message window where you invoked it.

In addition to this game-changing tweak, Ofaco also allows you to define default completions that will always appear on the list. This means you can add both individual words and whole phrases that you commonly use, making text completion even faster and more efficient.

Overall, I highly recommend Ofaco to any Mail users out there looking to turbocharge their typing experience.