10 Uses For Text Replacements On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some examples of how you can use Text Replacements on your Mac. 

So text replacements are a feature on your Mac where you can type a series of characters and they are replaced with other characters automatically. It works in just about any place where you type text. For instance, one text replacement that is on your Mac by default is to replace the letters OMW with On My Way!. You can see the replacement appear there as an AutoCorrect. So all you need to do to use this is press the Spacebar, Return, or any punctuation mark to indicate that you're done with that sequence of characters and it replaces it with what's below. So if I were to type space you can see how it replaced OMW with On My Way and an exclamation point after it. These are completely customizable. You find them in System Settings and then go to Keyboard. There's a button there called Text Replacement. Click on that and now you'll see a list here of the initial trigger to replace and what to replace it with. For instance here is OMW and On My Way! You can add new ones with the Plus Button, select and remove these with the Minus if they are getting in the way, and you can edit either side of this by selecting it first and then doing a single click after it's selected, wait about a second, and you see now you can Edit either one of these. 

So one thing you can use this for are simple little phrases like on my way. You can create your own. For instance, if I click Plus here and I use brb I can have it replaced with be right back. I can add an exclamation point if I want or a period. Whatever I like. Then I can click Add Here and you can see how it adds this custom new one. If I then go back to an app where I'm typing like Messages, I can type brb and you can see how it shows that it will replace it there. If I use space or return or some other piece of punctuation it replaces it. 

Now you want to be very careful when picking the replacement trigger to use something you would not normally type. In fact sometimes you want to make it completely impossible to accidentally trigger one of these by using special characters. Like, you may sometimes want to do brb because people recognize that as be right back. But if you're messaging somebody that doesn't know this then you might want to use the replacement. So what you can do here is instead of brb put an exclamation point before the text. Now in order to trigger this you can't just type brb. You have to type this entire thing. So, for instance, here I can go brb and it's fine. But if I do exclamation point brb then it does the replacement. You can see how I'm never going to accidentally type that. You can choose whatever you want. You can put a dash here or a semi-colon or whatever you like. Something easy for you to remember to use as special characters to start a trigger. 

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Now sometimes we have things that we type that aren't exactly natural. Like sometimes typing a long email address. Maybe not yours but maybe the email address for customer service for your company for example. You can use those as text replacements as well. So, for instance, I can do CSemail for customer service email. I can replace that with customer-service@example.com. Like that. So now when I add this I can be typing in a document or an email message like this and just type CSemail and you can see how it replaces it with that harder to type email address. You can do the same thing with a physical address. So, for instance, I can do coaddr for company address and I can replace it with a full address. So you can see I've typed this long thing here. It won't even fit in this field. But I can still use my pointer to move around, arrow keys to go back and forth, and then when I add it I can see it there. I can go back in and edit it. Note you can actually have new lines in here. One way to do it is to simply hold the Option Key and press Return. Do that everywhere you want a new line. Like that. So now I'll use the Up Arrow and I can see I've got several lines of text here. 

Another way to do it which might be much easier is to just open up a plain text TextEdit document or type anywhere the information you want on multiple lines. Then Copy it. Then in the With field here just Command V to paste it. You can see it is all there. Now when you type you can see how it is going to replace it with those multiple lines. Like that. 

This is also handy for URL's. Like I'll do exclamation point mm and I'll type out the full URL to my site. Maybe your website is even longer than this and it's just much easier to type those three characters.  But say you have a really long URL and you often find yourself typing that whole thing out or finding it and copying it and pasting it. You can Copy a long URL, like this one, to a video that I commonly refer to and I can paste that in here. So now I've got this really long URL here, maybe I call this, that, and now whenever I need to refer to that video I can easily remember the short replacement phrase there and now I get the whole URL. 

Now you may have noticed that some of the default examples that were there represent special characters. Like, for instance, the copyright symbol. It replaces left parenthesis c, right parenthesis with the copyright symbol. So that makes it really handy to type that. You can use your own unicode characters here as well. So, for instance, I'll use Plus here and let's say I want to do Star. I can do something like this if I want and now I want a unicode character. I'm going to use the Emoji & Special Character Viewer, which I can trigger with fn and e or the Control Command and Spacebar. That brings this up. I can search for characters. Let me search for Star. The one I want is this standard unicode Star here, like that. I can Add it. So now anytime I  want to type star I can do it pretty easily, like in this note here. Perhaps you're online and you come across something that looks like this. You think that's really cute and you want to use it here and there. But putting it in a document, remembering where it is so you can Copy & Paste it, that's going to be too many steps. So instead you just select this, copy from wherever you found it, maybe a webpage, and then add it as a text replacement, like this. Just paste it in here like that. Now anytime you want to use it you can. 

The same thing is true of Emoji. Notice when I brought up the special character viewer all the emoji were there. So you can have something like this and let's go and search for the pizza emoji and you can put it right there. Now you can type that instead of having to search for emoji each time.

Think creatively when you're using this. For instance you can use this for Headings for documents or notes. Like let's say you've got meeting notes and you commonly use these circle characters here and then things like Meeting Attendees is always the green one and the blue one is always progress from the previous meeting and all of that. You can add each of these individually as text replacements. Then you can have things like this to replace with these headings. So then all you need to do is type this, which is easy to type, and now you've got your heading. Just create a series of those to make it easier for you to take meeting notes or class notes or whatever. 

You can even do a little template, like this. Select all of this text, copy it, and then add Meeting Template and paste all of those lines in. You can see they're all in here. So now you can just start off, like that, Return, and then go back and fill in between. 

Now I personally like to use text replacements for longer things. Like, for instance, maybe you respond to a lot of email messages with text like this. Well, instead of typing it each time or finding it somewhere and copying it and pasting it, you can copy it to a text replacement. So I'm going to call this, you know, Custom Response, like that. Replace it with that by pasting it in. Now I can type this and easily insert this text. It can be a lot longer than this as well. For instance, here might be a long legal disclaimer that you sometimes need to put into email messages when you give advice or something like that. You can go to the disclaimer document you've got and Copy & Paste. But you can also copy and then paste it into a text replacement. Like I'll call this Legal, like that with an exclamation point in front. I'll paste this whole thing in and add it and then I can easily add disclaimer into an email message. 

Another place where we sometimes have to type a long thing is when typing in a browser address field. But text replacements work here as well. For instance OMW you can see pastes On My Way! But that's not really what you want here. What you want may be is something like this where you known you're going to do a question mark S equals and that's a search and then you would type the search term. I'll add it as a text replacement, let's do mms and then replace it with this. So now I can do mms, and it gets a little tricky because I can't press return here, it hasn't changed yet, so I want to do something like Press Space, but now I have an extra space there. So I want to press Delete to go back. One thing I could do here is edit this and leave off the equals. So now I type mms and then equals and you can see how it properly expands it, adds the equals there, and then I can type what I want to get the right URL.

But sometimes the space is fine. For instance you might do site:wikipedia.org to say that you only want to search wikipedia and maybe even include some search terms there and then just use this as the text replacement. So I'll add this one as whistory, for wikipedia history, put this here, like that, Add. Now I can type whistory space and you can see how it inserts that there and then return and it saves me a little time. 

One last way people use text replacements is sometimes as Spell Correction. Now, of course, AutoCorrect will work to correct your spelling but there are still places where we mistakenly type a word, and it's a correct word, but it is not the one we mean. So here's one example. You may never want to actually use this word but find you sometimes accidentally type it and in this case it will just replace it with this. It is like adding your own autocorrect. So now if I try to type that word it will change it. Just like I've added a custom autocorrect to the dictionary. Notice that if I don't want it to replace, sometimes it still does, even clicking here or using Escape won't get you out of the change. But, after I press Space a quick Command Z will revert the word and now I can continue typing. 

So one final tip. To get to Text Replacements you don't always have to go through the Apple Menu to System Settings and find Text Replacements in Keyboard. You can use Spotlight. Command Space and then search for Text Replacements, like that. Then you'll find under System Settings category right here a direct link to Text Replacements. It opens System Settings and takes you right there. 

I hope this inspires you to use Text Replacements more in lots of different ways. Thanks for watching.