Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com
On today's episode let's look at using Text Replacement on your Mac.
You've probably already seen text replacement in action. For instance, watch what I type
carefully. Notice that I typed t e h and it instantly changed it to t h e. This is text
replacement in action. How does your Mac know to replace teh with the? Well it is not magic.
It is simply pulling from a list.
If you go to System Preferences, under Keyboard, click on Text. You get a full list of all
the text replacements that your Mac can do. Now your list is going to vary from mine depending
upon what you have installed and what you have done in the past. But you basically will
see things on the left that when you type them will be replaced with things on the right.
Sure enough there is teh replaced with the.
Let's look at some of the other ones that are here. You can see a few of them help you
with special characters without remembering how to actually access them. Like parentheses
surrounding a c will give you the copyright symbol. 1/2 will give you the single character
for � and you've got things like TM replaced with � .
Let's look in TextEdit here and try some of these. (c) � you can see that one works;
1/2 � that one works; TM � and that one works. So a quick and easy way to get to these
but they are nothing special because you can go in here and you can remove them by simply
hitting the minus after one is selected or you can add some of your.
Now let's try adding one of our own. With the plus button here let's try tyvm and change
that to thank you very much. Hit return. Now I find it can be a little finicky. I bet you
it is not going to work right here. Sure enough it didn't. The beginning of a line sometimes
it doesn't seem to work for everything. But you can see it works perfectly fine there
if I type it further in the line.
So I find this is true for even some of the defaults. Sometimes teh will work and sometimes
it won't. Like that.
There are some great uses for this. For instance say you have a very long email address. Maybe
you have several email addresses and one of them is really long. You can type something
like email7 and have that changed to your very long email address. Now when you are
typing something like this you can see it inserts it and you don't have to type all
those characters, perhaps maybe getting some of them wrong.
Here is another thing you can do. You can have a very long piece of text. So I have
it replace message-sorry with this very long piece of text right here. So I'm going to
go in here and I'm going to do it and you can see it put that whole sentence in there.
I can make something a lot longer. This could make responding to some emails very easy because
you can have a whole sequence of these things and just remember what they are and it will
basically insert this in there kind of acting as kind of a buffer like a clipboard for various
things you need to type.
Now there are individual settings for this in different apps. So, for instance, in TextEdit
if you go to Preferences under New Document you have settings here for Text Replacement.
I can turn that off for a new document. Also in each individual document I can to Edit
and I can go to Substitutions under Edit and turn on or off Text Replacement for the document
that I have currently opened.
The same thing is true for Pages. In Pages you can go into Edit, Substitutions, and there
is Text Replacement as well.
So most apps that you use and type text will have something under Edit, Substitutions especially
if it is a recent Apple app. Some may not and just have it automatically turned on and
others may not support it at all. But most of the standard Mac apps like Mail and Pages
and Textedit will allow you to use the substitutions built into the system.
You can also use these to make emoji easier to type. So for instance I can do smile with
three exclamation points will translate to a smiley face. I'm going to use Command Control
and Space for the shortcut to bring up the little control panel here with all of the
emoji on it and I'm going to put this guy in there and now when I type smile!!! it will
replace it with the little emoji.