MacOS – text replacements stored

icloudkeyboardmacosshortcut

I want to import Apple text replacements from a text file. I want to import a large amount of shortcuts to the system so I am wondering if that is possible.

Example of Apple keyboard shortcuts I'm talking about

Best Answer

  1. Select all the shortcuts you wish to export and drag them to a location in Finder. This will create a ‘Text Substitutions.plist’.
  2. Move this file to another account/computer, then drag it back on top of the list to import the file.

Full details are provided by Apple in their support document on the matter:

In direct answer to the question title, the actual location used for storing substitutions is within the UserDictionary.db somewhere within ~/Library/Dictionaries/CoreDataUbiquitySupport/. This is not something you should modify manually. Also - since this data is iCloud backed - some versions and point in time it used an older storage method and API (iCloud Core Data) and now it's using a more modern key value store (CloudKit).

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