Stop Retyping the Same Things Over and Over
If you find yourself typing the same email address, phone number, or awkward phrase multiple times a day, text expansion is worth knowing about. It’s a simple feature built right into macOS, iOS, and iPadOS that lets you type a short shortcut and have it automatically expand into whatever word, phrase, or block of text you want.
No AI, no chatbot tone, just faster typing.
How to Set it Up
On a Mac, go to System Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements. On iPhone or iPad, head to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. Each entry has two parts: the shortcut you type and the phrase it expands into.
Type the shortcut followed by a space or punctuation, and it swaps in automatically in almost any app. If it’s not working in a Mac app like Mail or Safari, check that Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement is enabled.
If you’re signed into the same Apple Account across your devices, your text replacements sync automatically, so a shortcut you set up on your Mac works on your iPhone too.
Tip: To create replacements more quickly, you can export a list of text replacements, edit the list, and re-import it; Apple provides instructions. This export/import capability also lets you share text replacements with someone else.
What Text to Expand
Replacements can be up to about 1,900 characters and can include spaces, line breaks, symbols, accented characters, and emoji. Once you start using text expansion, you’ll quickly notice where it can help. Some common uses:
- Your email address, phone number, and mailing address
- Boilerplate email replies you send frequently
- Email sign-offs
- URLs or email addresses you share often
- Long medical, technical, or scientific terms
- Proper nouns with tricky spelling or accents (like Zoë Saldaña)
- Words you consistently mistype
- Frequently used emoji or special characters
A handy convention for emoji and special characters is to start those shortcuts with a colon, like :tu for 👍 or :roll for 🙄. It makes them easy to remember and avoids accidental expansions.
One thing to watch out for: don’t use a shortcut you’ll also want to type normally. Using mm for “Mickey Mouse” will cause problems any time you write about 35mm film.
Third-Party Text Expansion
With such a useful feature built into macOS and iOS, why would you want to spend money on a third-party utility like TextExpander (macOS and iOS), Typinator (macOS and iOS), or TypeIt4Me (macOS)?
Apple’s built-in text expansion works well for most everyday uses, but it has some limitations—its interface is cramped, it doesn’t work in every app, and you can’t include formatted text or images in your expansions. Third-party utilities fill those gaps.
They can include styled text and graphics in expansions, insert the current date and time, respect case when expanding abbreviations, include the contents of the clipboard in expanded text, automatically fix common typos, and much more.
So think about which bits of text you might want to expand automatically, and give Apple’s built-in text expansion feature a try today! If it seems constraining after a while, a third-party app can take text expansion to the next level.
(Featured image generated by Adam Engst with ChatGPT)
