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Text Shortcuts You Should Be Using on iPhone and Mac
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Changing Regards to Retards, Cheers to “Already 5 beers in”, and “keyboard” to “bigbaddoohickey” can be the source of endless juvenile hilarity (the best kind!)
CarlJ
Contributor
It drove me nuts for a while that Apple would decide "well, you're close enough to the shortcut that we'll take pity and fill it in for you" - no, I specifically chose my shortcuts to be text that would never come up normally. Thankfully, they fixed this eventually.
Yep, all of mine are of the form "!ab", where the two letters clue me in, and the leading "!" ensures that I'm doing it on purpose. Also reminds me of csh/bash history substitution, which entertains me. I had had a haphazard naming system early on, but, combined with the above problem of Apple deciding that "close enough was okay" in the early days, I actually ended up writing a script to look through a large body of English language text (the wordlist that ships with Unix, along with a few books) to find least frequently occurring letter pairs - turns out that "(anything)x" is pretty infrequent, if you avoid vowels for the first letter.
"!fx" for full name, "!mx" for email address (amuses me because DNS uses MX records for mail), "!nx" for my normal username on various systems, "!px" for my ten-digit phone number, "!sx" for my street address, "!cx" for my city name, and "!xz" for my full zip+4 zipcode. And it's so nice to be able to use, for instance, the email one, and know for certain that I haven't made a typo - like, yes, I know my own email address, yes, it's easy to type, but typos still happen occasionally. It's almost a security thing, to avoid typos, more than a timesaver.
I did a few of those at first, and ended up just building myself a... sort of a clown alphabet, so "!uu" gets me "unusual unicode", namely this mouthful (non-ASCII / non-emoji characters that I might want to use, that I can't get from the iOS keyboard):
©®℗™°¢µ‽℅№§¶†‡·•‣⅛¼⅜½⅝¾⅞⅓⅔±×÷≠∞¬∴⌘⌥⌃⇧⏎↑→↓←△□○✕
I use that mostly in textfields on iOS, where I find it easier to dump in the entire set and select out the character(s) I want, rather than to have a whole bunch of different macros for each character or set of characters. From time to time, if I come up with another character I need, I just add it to the one list in the one place.
That is a useful idea I'll have to consider.
I also have "!pqnld" for "¿Por qué no los dos?" because I find places I want to use that occasionally and it saves me having to get the "¿" and remember the accented letters. Come to think of it, there are a handful of sentences that I find myself using over and over (mostly for moderating/helping on Reddit) that I ought to put in to text replacement.
By the way, for getting access to arbitrary unicode characters on iOS/iPadOS, I've been happily using Unicode Pad Pro for many years. It has a custom keyboard you can install, but I don't bother (I'd rather have the keyboard toggle just have text / emoji rather than cycling through a list). But it's great for looking up arbitrary characters by name, and copying the unicode character from that, to paste into a document. If it's a one-off, I'll do that, if it's something I'll use more than a few times, I'll add it to my "!uu" macro.
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schappim
macrumors regular
One of my kids pranked the other by changing “no” to “yes” and vice versa.
adrianlondon
macrumors 604
I use a semicolon for some of mine - the ones that print characters that aren't easy to type, or whose key combo I forget.
A couple of examples:
;mus ♫ ;deg °
Dreagthe
macrumors newbie
As a writer, I just live on text replacements. There are so few actually common words, and if you make short versions of each you can create a kind of typing shorthand that at least doubles your typing speed. Even short words (aa becomes and, saving a keystroke.) Eventually they become muscle memory, and your words just fly onto the screen. However, the Apple text replacements have been buggy forever—as soon as you have more than a hundred or so they just randomly don’t work. On macOS I run a third party app (atext, there are others I’m sure) that can read in the Apple ones and make them reliable, or create independent and more clever ones. While the Apple ones do sync to iPadOS they are even more unreliable there—I’ve not found a good solution for that yet, but writing on the iPad is a pain anyway.
One would think Option-Shift-K is faster.
Try setting it to T9 input. See if that helps.
geoelectric
macrumors 6502
It also occurs when a web developer *does* set the field as a username login field, because then iOS shows their password UI and, for whatever reason, doesn't honor text replacements while that's up.
Unfortunately, the login name is where I usually type my email address, so the technique is of limited use to me. Worked great before they put in the password-filling functionality, though.
Good article. Have used it in the past. Easy to use and comes in handy sometimes!!
adrianlondon
macrumors 604
Only if one remembers it. I can't remember the last time I needed to type , so if I ever did I'd probably just google it and cut/paste it from somewhere 😁.
(It doesn't even show properly in the post above for me!)
Abazigal
Contributor
For flipping table and shrugging emojis, my shortcuts are /flip and /shrug respectively.
Also, "addr" expands to my home address,
tyf - Thank you for your attention in this matter.
fyi - For your information.
Take the time to set them up and you never have to rely on shorthand again. 🙂
Also, "addr" expands to my home address,
tyf - Thank you for your attention in this matter.
fyi - For your information.
Take the time to set them up and you never have to rely on shorthand again. 🙂
sejoki
macrumors newbie
I've had that since text replacements were possible. I'm sometimes even surprised it's still active because I'm not used to setting something up once and it remaining the same for 10 years.
It’s always something
macrumors 6502a
Not if you’re using an on-screen keyboard 😉
You are practising WYSIWIT (What You See Is What I Typed).
For common words, would strongly recommend using something like "(shrug)” instead of “shrug” in something like this, so you don’t inadvertantly make it impossible to use the normal word anymore.
imola.zhp
macrumors 65816
I only had "OMW" and "OTW" from way back in the day when the feature was first added, 12-13 years ago? lol
I just added 10 more from the comments here, now lets see if I can remember to use them!
I just added 10 more from the comments here, now lets see if I can remember to use them!
CarlJ
Contributor
It's possible they may come back for a visit - I had "omw" that was an example provided by Apple - I deleted it after I finally got around to setting up my own, and Apple very "helpfully" added it back in at least half a dozen times.
I suspect that when it was sharing around between devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad), it was going "oh, hey, there's this 'omw' on one device that isn't on the others, we'll copy it around for you - you're welcome!" - you know, instead of saying, "oh, hey, this 'omw' shortcut was deleted on one system let's propagate that deletion everywhere".
I haven't seen it in a while, so it might be finally gone, but I'm not going to be super surprised if it pops up again.