How to use OS X Mountain Lion’s built-in ‘Substitution’ text expansion feature (with video)

“Surprise! Mountain Lion has a great new secret feature: basic text expansion. Here’s how to set it up and some handy shortcuts to get you started,” Adam Dachis reports for Lifehacker.

For a demo of how it works and how to set it up, check out the video below.

Dachis reports, “First things first, let’s get text expansion (or Substitution, as Apple calls it) set up.”

To get it set up, either watch the video up top or follow these steps:

1. Open up System Preferences.
2. Choose the Language & Text section.
3. Click the Text tab.
4. Press the + button at the bottom-right corner of the window.
5. Type the shortcut you want to use in the left text box, and what you want that shortcut to expand to in the right box.
6. Repeat as desired.

Dachis reports, “Now for some phrases you should add right now…”

Read more in the full article here.

17 Comments

    1. Jean, I don’t think it has anything to do with the OS. In Lion as well as Mtn. Lion I’ve had varying lengths of time before comments were posted. Some immediate, others a few minutes. I’ve decided to simply post a comment and move on. If the thread has an interesting topic, I’ll drag the URL onto my Desktop so I can catch up with later comments.

    2. Same thing happens under Tiger and Snow Leopard.

      I think the matter is with MDN’s servers, and not the audience’s clients. I’m guessing that at some times, their servers are under more load, and updating the comment database is a lower priority task than serving pages to be read.

  1. According to Snow Leopard Help for this feature, “In some applications, such as iChat, iPhoto, Mail, Safari, and TextEdit, you can automatically replace text with other text or symbols.” So, nothing new, but, maybe, other apps are supporting it now.

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