Text replacements: make your Mac type the long things

Steps

1. 01

   Open the list

   It lives with the keyboard settings

   Ventura or later

   • Apple menu›System Settings›Keyboard›Text Replacements

   Monterey or earlier

   • Apple menu›System Preferences›Keyboard, then the Text tab

   ✓You should see: A two-column list: the shortcut you type on the left, what it becomes on the right.

2. 02

   Add the ones you retype most

   • Click the Add button, type the shortcut and its replacement, then click Add
   • Start with the genuinely tedious ones: your email address, your postal address, your phone number, a standard sign-off

   ✓You should see: Your new pair listed, and working immediately in other apps.

3. 03

   Choose shortcuts you would never type by accident

   This is the difference between a useful feature and a daily irritation

   • Prefix them so they cannot collide with real words — @@em for your email, @@addr for your address
   • A shortcut like 'addr' is fine until the day you type it inside another word

   Why?

   If a replacement fires when you did not want it, press Command-Z immediately — undo puts the typed shortcut back.

4. 04

   Get them on your iPhone and iPad too

   They travel through iCloud, with no separate setting to find

   • Set up iCloud Drive on your Mac, iPhone and iPad, and sign in to the same Apple Account on each
   • A replacement added on the Mac then works on the other devices, and the other way round

   ✓You should see: The same shortcut expanding on your iPhone.

5. 05

   Back the list up once you rely on it

   • Drag the selected replacements out of the Text Replacements window onto the desktop
   • That creates a backup file — a property list (.plist) — which you can keep or hand to another Mac user

   ✓You should see: A .plist file on the desktop.

   !Careful: Think before you store anything sensitive as a replacement. It expands in any app, in front of anyone looking at your screen, and it travels to your other devices.

   Also see: Turn on FileVault full-disk encryption