Snow Leopard Tip: Turn on “Text Substitutions”
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Snow Leopard has a great new feature: "Text Substitutions". When turned on, it helps you type your messages:
- Text Replacements: Define short text snippets which are automatically expanded when entered.
- Smart Links: Enter an URL and it automatically is turned into a clickable link.
- Smart Dashes: Replaces the a double dash to a long dash character, which looks better.
- Smart Quotes: Enter book-like quotes.
Here's how you can turn on the feature inside Mailplane:
- Compose a new message
- Control-Click the body text
- Click Substitutions > Show Substitutions to open the "Substitution" utility window.
- Turn on the substitutions you need, I find the Text Replacement feature most useful.
- Press the "Text Preferences..." button to define your own text replacements
- Now test it: Enter (c) or TM followed by space to replace the text with a copyright/trademark sign.
Tip: You can also access the text replacement settings by going to System Preferences > Text/Languages/Text:
One more thing: If you need to manage more text replacements, try Mailplane's text snippet feature. Define text snippets in Preferences > Accounts > Text Snippets and insert into your email by using the ⌘-Option-I keyboard shortcut.
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Comments
Posted by Bill Sodeman (09/02 at 06:22 AM)
Posted by Naz (09/03 at 08:58 AM)
I was aware of the text substitution feature of Snow Leopard, but what i was NOT aware of was how to do it in Mailplane.
I’ve been trying to work it out, and gave up until this article.
Thanks very much, great feature integrated into Mailplane, and also thanks for the article on how to do it!
By the way, I must say I have been using Mailplane for quite a while (paid user), and love this app, I use it everyday, all day long. Keep up the good work you do.
Posted by Ruben (09/03 at 09:13 AM)
Hi Naz,
Thanks for your kind words and positive feedback!
Ruben
Posted by dan markovitz (11/20 at 06:20 PM)
Need some help: I followed the directions for text substitutions in mail.app, but I don’t know how to get mail to actually substitute the text. When I type the text to be substituted (“tb”) it just stays in the message as “tb.”
Thoughts?
Posted by Ruben (11/22 at 12:30 PM)
Hi Dan,
Make sure you have turned on Text Substitutions. This needs to be repeated for each application: Right click the body text, select substitutions and make sure “Text Replacements” is checked.
Next: Enter a space after tb to do trigger the text replacement.
Hope this helps.
Ruben
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Very nice! Works right the first time, just as it should…