More Efficiency, Productivity, Style, and Correctness.

Text Replacements is a feature on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices (and others) that replaces a shortcut with a replacement. For instance, "omw" can be replaced with "on my way." They are very useful for making a writing workflow way more efficient. Also, they can be used to write characters that are not available on a standard keyboard. The usage of Text Replacements also ensures consistency in style, especially in regards to spaces and special-use characters. How I use Text Replacements to significantly enhance and speed up my writing is explained in the following:

Shortcuts

This category is probably the most known and used one: creating shortcuts for (often typed) words or phrases. For instance, instead of writing my full email address, I just write "@@." This makes frequent sentences like "My email is…" much more quick. Furthermore, I have "##" for my phone number, "addr" for my address (that is four characters instead of 28), and my initilals for my full name. I also have a shortcut for the name of my hometown and "deu" for "Deutschland." Instead of writing lengthy months like "Dezember," I simply write "dez" and Text Replacement does the rest. For the standard Lorem Ipsum sentence, I type out "loremipsum"; for "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" I write "quickbrown." As you can see, this saves a lot of time for phrases that are used often. It's very convenient using these shortcuts. Moreover, this ensures that you never misspell these.

Non-Standard Characters

There are a lot of characters useful for creative processes that are not available on standard keyboards, especially on mobile phones. These include the pilcrow sign ("¶"); the trademark, copyright, etc. symbols; the numero sign ("№"); the asterism ("⁂"); or the estimated symbol ("℮"). A simple substitution from "numero" to "№" saves many seconds over inserting the character from macOS's character picker or some Google result.

Numbers

Ligature fractions provided by the font look the best, but it is not easy accessing them. The fractions-characters in Unicode are not much easier to get; however, they are easy to use when you create a Text Replacement with them. "1/3" gets automatically replaced with "⅓," and 17 other fractions do the same. Making characters super- or subscript is possible in many but not all apps. Further, super- and subscript characters from the font itself look better anyways. And because of this, I have shortcuts for the numbers 0 through 9 with the prefix "_" (subscript) and "^" (superscript). For example, "_2" gets replaced with "₂."

Mathematics

In mathematics, there are a lot of characters that are not available on a standard keyboard, especially greek symbols. While on macOS, I could technically use the character picker everytime I want to write a greek letter, on iOS it is a lot more cumbersome. Thus, when I write "sigma," for example, I get "σ." And the best part of it is that Text Replacement automatically replaces the shortcut with the lower- or uppercase variant depending on the capitalization of the shortcut: "Sigma" is replaced with "Σ" instead. I can write "∫" by typing "integral," "√" by typing "sqrt," etc.

Abbreviations

I often use abbreviations, but it is time consuming writing them correctly. Using the visually better non-breaking thin space is impossible in most cases, so that a Text Replacement becomes necessary. "Eg" gets replaced with "e.g.,"; "ie" with "i.e.,"; "zb" with "z. B."; and "oae" with "o. Ä.". This ensures that abbreviations always look their best. Moreover, for the sake of efficiency and easiness, English contractions, like "I'll," "aren't," or "doesn't" and German omissions like "hab'," "geht's," or "'nen" are automatically the replacement for the shortcut without the apostrophe. This also ensures that the right apostrophe is used. I can simply write fast, and Text Replacements assures that it looks its best. Also, when you prefer spelling out an abbreviation, you can make the abbreviation the shortcut and the spelled-out phrase the replacement; quick, and easy.

Corrections

I want to have a high level of correctness in my writing, but also be as efficient as possible. Corrections for words with diacritical signs make sure I always spell them right but do not need to worry about typing the diacritic. In these cases, the shortcut text is just the ASCII variant of it, like "facade" to "façade." Other words I write the same way are "fiancé," "fiancée," "résumé," "vis-à-vis," and "cliché." Also, I prefer writing the period and comma before the quotation mark, but I find it more easy writing it the other way around. No problem, as Text Replacements does the job.

Spaces

While the non-breaking space can easily be accessed on a macOS keyboard, this is not efficiently possible on other devices. And non-breaking thin spaces can only be accessed via detours. I prefer separating values and symbols (e.g., the percent sign from the percent value) and parts of German abbreviations (e.g., "u. U.") with a non-breaking thin space for two reasons: (1) the narrower space looks great without being to wide and (2) it assures that value and symbol or parts of an abbreviation are not separated over line endings. Thus, it is necessary to have Text Replacements to handle the insertion of the special space. The German abbreviations are written with the space in the replacement. For the symbols, the shortcut is the symbol itself and the replacement the symbol with a leading non-breaking thin space. This means every of these symbols is always written with the correct space. For instance, "73€" is replaced with "73 €." (It looks better than "73 €" and saves me a keystroke.) Again, I write as I would normally, and Text Replacements makes it automatically look great. Unfortunately, letter-based units of measure like "m" or "km/h" do not work the same, as Text Replacements needs a space separating them from the value to recognize them.

Arrows

Arrows can be used in many contexts, however the all-too-often-seen "->" does not properly achieve its purpose. It simply is not a real arrow, and in most fonts the hyphen and the greater than sign do not even align. Furthermore, the hyphen is too short for a good-looking arrow. The best method is to use the Unicode arrows. Thus, typing "->" is automatically replaced with "→." Looks much better!

There are a lot of opportunities for writers when using Text Replacements that range from making writing faster to making it easy to write special characters and to ensure good style. Every writer should use it, and the ones who don't are missing out — except, of course, if you are paid by the hour.