Text Expansion Problems

Posted on January 18, 2013
Filed Under System | 5 Comments

Michael Tsai had some comments on my post about typing special characters using the Keyboard Pref Pane. He mentioned that it worked inconsistently for him. I was surprised as it had always worked for me. I think I found what the problem was. Apparently Mail doesn’t respect Apple’s text expansion. This is pretty surprising to me. I didn’t notice it simply because the expansions I used in Mail were more intelligent. It’s big issue. I wonder what other applications don’t work with the native text expansion.

In any case as I am switching from Quickeys to Keyboard Maestro I am converting my expansion shortcuts to use Keyboard Maestro rather than Apple’s text pref pane.

Related posts:

  1. Mountain Lion Initial Thoughts
  2. Things Still Not Working in Mountain Lion
  3. Text Processing Macros
  4. Typing Special Characters
  5. Open WIth BBEdit
  6. Switching to Keyboard Maestro
  7. Using SL’s Text Snippets
  8. Textmate like Auto-Pairing in BBEdit

Comments

5 Responses to “Text Expansion Problems”
1 Christopher Stone on January 18th, 2013 10:13 pm

You don’t want to use Keyboard Maestro for text expansions UNLESS you have a relative few.

If like me you have hundreds, you want a specialized app like Typinator, TypeIt4Me, or TextExpander.

I prefer Typinator, because it has the most intelligent search function — but I used TypeIt4Me for 20 years and TextExpander for a couple.

-ccs

I don’t have that many and I can keep them in different folders. Organizing I KM is definitely one of its weaker aspects.

Text substitutions work for me in Mail. I do notice that in some apps I have to make sure Edit › Substitutions › Text Replacement is turned on – some seem to have it disabled by default.

Wow – you’re right. I bet that’s what’s happening to Michael as well. Since I went to all the trouble of switching things over yesterday I’ll just keep this in Keyboard Maestro. But now I know what to look for.

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