Share your useful text replacements

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been addicted to text replacement for 30 years or however long it’s been available and I think it’s been at least 30 years, although I think back then it was just via a third-party apps.

I think most people who use it are familiar with using it to correct missing apostrophes or misplaced apostrophes in words like don’t (but if you’re not, definitely that’s a major one! The trigger is obviously “dont”, which is then corrected to don’t, etc. I’m not going to give another example because I had to fight with this to let me write that don’t that did not have the apostrophe because of my wonderful text replacement.:roll_eyes:)

Of course you also probably use it already to correct things that you misspell, if you know what your misspelling typically is… Or maybe you plug in several options just in case.

But I also use it for things that I just don’t enjoy typing for a variety of reasons: it’s long, it’s hard to spell and I have to think about it, or it has punctuation that I don’t frequently use, such as @ in email addresses, or perhaps just data I don’t remember unless I go look it up.

The last category is the one where I think you guys might have some good suggestions I would love to get my hands on.

Most recently I had occasion to deal with my VIN number a great deal because of various issues with my car. Two look ups and I was in the text replacement setting to trigger the actual number when I type in the word V I N - Actually to be honest I only made that change today after having it set up for a few weeks as the letters V N N. But today I realized that those three letters using the I Are not likely to be misinterpreted as anything else so typing them in normally will work just as well.

I also have occasion for various reasons to save several addresses that I use not that frequently but frequently enough that I can remember a shortcut easier than I can remember the address, or perhaps just the zip. I will usually set it up as maybe the abbreviation for the city
And the word zip: sdzip for San Diego. or the person associated and “add” or “addy” such as “sisaddy”.

I also find text replacements useful because I actually do 95% of my text creation of whatever sort using dictation. That can introduce a lot of issues, such as dictation not understanding that Killian is spelled with a C, not a K. Or that when I say the word serious, I mean the word serious, and not Sirius Radio. Or, really weirdly, my dictation seems to believe that the primary reason anybody would say ludicrous is because they’re referring Ludicris. But also dictating can be easier than typing out certain things which, if set up as a text replacement, wouldn’t necessarily be that much easier but since I speak it, it is easier than whatever text I want written.

Pretty much any place I find myself needing to type something that’s a pain to type or a pain to remember, I try to figure out a text replacement that’ll work. I even did one for “metacritic critics reviews” because searching for film reviews would get me Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb or regular Joe reviews or something else and I almost always wish to read Metacritic critic reviews of whatever it is I’m interested in. So setting up “mtc” to plug-in after the name of a film or TV show gives me film or TV show Metacritic critics reviews right off the bat I don’t have to fight or search or do anything else I just get what I know I want and what I know will probably not be the first easy result I want.

Is anybody else this weirdly obsessive about text replacement and able to share some good ideas with us? Or is it just me because I sit in front of screens typing virtually every waking hour and have for four decades?

TL;DR

Is just fleshing out the title, which I think is pretty clear.

2

I have a few for my common typos e.g teh becomes the. And I had 4 for sig lines for my various roles. Now that I’ve retired from career and volunteer work I need none of them.

But all were defined only in MS Office which doesn’t affect my browser typing. Which has in recent years gone from 5% of my text entry to 95%.

So mostly “No, not anymore”.

What app do you use to define these text replacements that work in all your apps?

3

I do that one a lot too.

I also always seem to type “rogue” as “rouge” but there is not a good way to sort that one out.

Dunno why I do that but, for some reason I do.

4

Without trying to threadshit I wonder about this whole “dictating your typing” thing.

We have enough useless posters whose posts read like stream of consciousness drivel with zero effort to edit. We sure don’t need to encourage more of that.

Lastly, color me mystified about how dictation could tie in successfully w text substitution? Maybe I just lack imagination but saying e.g. “sisaddr” (pronounced how?) taken from the OP and getting a useful result just sounds … wacky.

I may be a Luddite here.

5

Luddites were not ignorant or afraid of technology. They smashed machines that were introduced by employers to cut the work force by half. I think this is worth harping on because such resistance is as important now as it was in the 1800s. From my sense of your posts, LSLGuy, you in fact have a pretty big strand of that Luddism in you, and I salute it!

6

It is built in to iOS! part of the system software, found under settings: keyboard: text replacement. I was going to say it is built into all things Apple but I’m not certain if that’s true since I haven’t had a computer to work on in a few years and I’m just on my iPad and my iPhone and I do not recall specifically… Although those sorts of things do tend to carry across all the way from computers to iPads to iPhones.

7

Well, in spite of the fact that we are fellow charter members, I guess I haven’t made much impact on you over the years… But folks who remember me know that I have absolutely no trouble at all using a keyboard to be verbose and voluminous in my posting without the ability to dictate. Although not formally trained, I am or was a pretty fast typist before I got into dictation and before I was using mobile devices (which I got into specifically for the dictation aspect, as a matter of fact. I was not motivated until it was introduced in iPhone 4) And I quickly learned how much I loathe typing on a screen.

Lastly, color me mystified about how dictation could tie in successfully w text substitution? Maybe I just lack imagination but saying e.g. “sisaddr” (pronounced how?) taken from the OP and getting a useful result just sounds … wacky.

Sometimes I may also involve actual Voice Commands (also built in, for actually controlling the device, also been waiting on that for decades. I was a Star Trek girl.) Part of which includes an actual vocabulary and teaching it how you say things.

8

I’ll bet you have 100 times as many occasions to type “rogue” than you have to type “rouge”, so if I were you I would just make a text replacement for rouge that is rogue. Especially since rouge is becoming archaic, and I say that as a 66-year-old woman who is very fond of and uses vintage vocabulary freely- These days I would say “blush”.

9

I do a search for form when I really mean from.

10

I think of rouge as a color before i think of it as a face powder.

I use swype, which isn’t exactly a text replacement, but comes from a similar place. The upside is that i don’t have to peck our letters on my phone, one by one. It’s faster and more ergonomic. The downside is that i make a ton of swypos, and don’t catch all of them.

I turned off text replacement in M$ products. I used Excel far more than word, where i often wanted some weird character string. And i was in the insurance industry, and CNA was a competitor i often wanted to mention, and it drove me freaking nuts that my software wanted to turn that into “CAN”. Also, i often wanted lettered labels (in a footnote or label in Excel, which doesn’t automatically do “numbered” lists) and it was annoying as heck to have “c)” turned into “'©”.

11

don’t even say this to me! As much as I rely on dictation and as much as I will always rely on dictation… Apple’s dictation is asinine and drives me insane. They are making it stupider and stupider and stupider as time goes by. I understand what they’re doing, they are trying to accommodate the widest number of people, but with someone like me that’s a disastrous move because I actually have a vocabulary and I know how to use it.

There’s lots of things to complain about but the absolute worst, that I have no idea why they introduced this a few years ago, it’s insanity on a plate, is the way their dictation will put in the word I actually say, I watch it do so. I continue, and I don’t go back and check to make sure everything’s OK before sending and only discover later that it went back and changed it to something more pedestrian and common because it didn’t really believe that I meant what I said, that it heard correctly the first time. I am praying that Apple and AI will be something of a fix for this

Because this is not just mildly annoying… depending on the circumstance, this is enraging. I have been an Apple devotee since the 80s, and that is not going to change. (I do not exaggerate for effect when I say that even looking at a Windows screen stresses me out and makes me super tense because it’s so fucking ugly-even now it remains fucking ugly. It’s not as ugly as it was but it’s hideous… And of course the way it operates is horrible. And I am not somebody who was first introduced to computers on Apple. My first introduction to using computers on a daily basis was with pre-MS-DOS operating system called CP/M. Just in case that was gonna come up…)
But I have to say I am very very sad and disappointed at the directions they have taken in recent years and their devotion to nanny tech. It does not help me it hinders me, it gets in my way, it infuriates me…

12

Google does this to me, too. Freaking infuriating.

13

I swear google / MS is crowdsourcing spellcheck these days. The volume of misspelled words it accepts is flat horrifying. And although most spellcheck systems have a way for you to add extra correct words it doesn’t recognize, like family names, it utterly lacks a way to add entries to force words it wants to accept as ok to be considered misspelled.

14

How do you do a text replacement in, for example, Word? I make the same typos repeatedly and would like to start replacing “the” with “the” but have no idea how to make my laptop start doing this.

15

Maybe it already has?

16

That was weird. Let me try again:

the

Yup. You’re right.

I’d still like to know how to do text replacements.