MacOS – General Autocompletion

auto-completekeyboardmacos

Does anyone know of a good way to have autocompletion of custom items on a mac? I know this is built into different programs, but what I would like would be independent of the program being used. For example, if I need to type my email address somewhere I would like to be able to enter the first few letters and then have it completed for me.

Best Answer

Basic autocompletion is built into macOS. For example, you can type bjbk@ to get bjbk@example.com or similar.

  • Go to System Preferences... (From  Menu or your Dock or Spotlight)
  • Go to Keyboard
  • Select Text tab
  • Click the + button
  • Add text to replace, followed by the text you wish to replace it with. The shortcuts work in most applications. (Tested MS Office and others on my system. OS X 10.10.x; Office 2011 v14.5.x)

Keyboard text preferences

Alternative to built in text replace:

aText (not free but very inexpensive) on the App Store is a great 3rd party alternative too. Great for code completion or adding dates, times, etc. (I am on no way affiliated with the developer, just a user.)

UPDATE:
Developer's note on the App Store version.

About Mac App Store version.

aText Mac App Store version can no longer fully work on OS X 10.11 El Capitan and later because of new App Sandboxing restrictions. This is not fixable. If you purchased aText on Mac App Store, please switch to non-MAS (non sandboxed) version for free.

aText

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