I type the following in TextEdit and Notes on my mac (11.7.10, Intel): Just to overt. Just to overt go. Just to overt goi. Just to overt goin. Just to overt going. Just to overt going on. Just tu overt going. Just toi overt going. Just to overt. The only words underlined in red as unrecognized are "tu", "toi", and "to" in the last 3 lines but not in the first 3 or final line. Why is this? I check the ascii codes in Terminal and they are the same in all 7 lines containing "to". Right now at least, this only seems to affect native programs, for example on StackExchange in Firefox, all expected words are underlined (tu, toi, goi, goin) but when I edit the same post in Safari I get the same behavior as Notes and Text Edit but if I create a new line the underline might appear or disappear but it ONLY appears or disappears for the "to" in lines 4-6. I have checked all visible user changes to the dictionary and of course the word "to" is in the dictionary, also the word can be looked up in all 7 lines and returns the correct definition for "to" despite ctrl + click suggesting I replace it with "too". I understand a good "fix" for this problem might be to reinstall a clean copy of the OS but I would really like to identify the change causing the behavior first so I can check for it again (it also affects other words such as "by"), whatever is changing the attributes of the characters I type. So I think there is some algorithm which changes what I type as the characters themselves seem to be modified in a way that only the operating system can interpret. I don't think it's a bug, I think some oversight in the software has been taken advantage of by a malicious actor. Some more examples: Just to overt going. Just to overt doing. Just to overt having. Just to overt swimming. Just to overt knitting. Just to overt welding. Just to overt simming. Just to overt knitaing. Just to overt weling. Just to overt kniting. Just to overt kkniting. Just to overt knituing. Can you guess which groups have "to" underlined? >! Groups 1, 3, and 5. Another reason why I don't want to wipe the OS, I strongly believe this interference has been tailored to me specifically (based on words I use and my usage patterns) and so it's particularly important I find out how in order to better understand why in order to avoid this kind of sabotage in the future (not just in macOS, especially with the existence now of malware on mobile operating systems which apparently cannot be traced or wiped).

On Mac, *en dash* and *em dash* characters can be typed with Opt - and Opt Shift -, respectively. But are there default shortcuts for other bar-like characters, especially for these ones: - U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN, - U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN, - U+2012 FIGURE DASH, - U+2212 MINUS SIGN? I did not find them, but maybe I was not searching properly. If you are going to answer that there are no such shortcuts, please point me to some reliable evidence like an official article on Apple’s website, or a full list of all existing shortcuts in latest version of macOS etc. Also, my question is about default shortcuts in a freshly-installed system, not for custom settings, tweaking DefaultKeyBinding.dict file, using third-party keyboard managers etc.

The text input autocomplete in the Music app is really intrusive. Most apps won't replace your text unless you choose to use the autocomplete suggestions, but Music replaces what you typed or simply adds in text without any additional input. This is in places like get info or editing rules for a smart playlist. It will substitute existing values in place of what you are typing. This is really annoying if you want to type something that doesn't exist yet, but partially matches. I would love to figure out how to disable this. Example of trying to type "heaters" where in one case it adds a whole bunch of text after the "h", the other where it leaves me with a capital "H" I have to go back and fix.

I am writing code in various text editors with Finnish keyboard layout. Sometimes I press alt+spacebar accidentally when writing symbols. E.g. if(foobar || foobar2) { ... there is a high change I type pipe+pipe+magical alt-spacebar character. The thing is, this alt+spacebar character is invisible like space, but behaves differently. Mainly it breaks code syntax in various occasions. However, because the character is invisible it is hard to track down. What is this alt+spacebar character? Is it possible to disable it so that when you press alt+spacebar it would type in a normal space?

I'm using a German Keyboard (Lioncast LK20) with OS X 10.11.5. I set the keymap to German and it is displayed correctly in the settings screen. Unfortunately the following two keys are swapped when I type on the keyboard: ^ Key (left of 1) Are there any advanced settings to fix this issue?

When playing a video game that takes up the whole screen, MacOS will regularly, several times during a session, hide the game window to highlight another program (an arbitrary one that has been used before the game) that has a selected text box which shows the white-on-blue language marker. How can MacOS be stopped from jumping out of full screen programs? If a game has a text box, the white-on-blue language marker will show up there moments before the jump out of the game. Making any action in the in-game text box will stop the jump (until the marker shows up again after some period). These automatic jumps out of the game are more probable if the user has manually done the jump themselves in a session. What feature is this and how can it be disabled?

I have a question about how to do something fairly specific in the Cocoa Text System. I use a tailored ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict file fairly often, to allow ready access to characters in other languages (Greek, Russian, Ukrainian) when it’s inconvenient to switch the entire keyboard layout, and to do things like add HTML tags on either side of a piece of text to add blockquote or code tags for pieces of text. [This article](http://www.cppblog.com/biao/archive/2011/12/12/161952.html) , by Jacob Rus, goes into a fair bit of detail on how to do this, and I’m grateful for his example and clarity. It’s frequently the case that the title of an article appears in the URL for that article with the + sign rather than the space character delimiting each word in the title. Being able to type or paste an article title and quickly switch all the spaces for + signs would be an enormous convenience to me. I am, however, at a loss for how to do this. I have experimented a little with the NSText replaceCharacters method, but the results have been disappointing.

My son follows an online typing course for school. This course is delivered through a website. As my son advances, he needs to type characters into Safari on macOS Sequoia like: è, é, ë, ü, ï. We have not found a way to type these characters in a way it satisfies the typing course. I think the site expects you to type a sequence of characters. For example, to type the __é__ I think it expects an ' + e. We tried multiple ways of typing these characters but have not found a way to satisfy the course software. These tricks did not work for me: - When you holddown on the e key the typingcourse software directly registers an e and it is counted as a wrong keystroke. - When you press the ' MacOS directly prints the character which is not the character the typingcourse software expects and it is counted as a wrong keystroke. Preferably without any additional software installs like Keyboard Maestro of similar. _And yes, I have send an email to the supplier but have not heard anything yet._ Is there a way in Safari and macOS to mimic the _Windows_ way of doing the keystrokes?

For instance, ▎(Left One Quarter Block, [U+258E](https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+258E)) can be shown in macOS but not 🮇 (Right One Quarter Block, [U+1FB87](https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1FB87)) , not even in the Character Viewer, or on native apps like Finder & Spotlight. That character was introduced in Unicode 13 in 2020. Any ideas to show *all* newer unicode characters, perhaps even patching fonts to do so.

My settings in Keyboard→Text replacements had two entries, 'pq' and 'omw'.  Since I never use them and don't recall creating them, I assume they are Apple's "helpful" defaults. But every time I type two hyphens consecutively, "something" changes it to an em-dash. This is unnecessary because I *always* type¹ an *actual* em-dash where appropriate.  And it's unwanted because -- is (or used to be) valuable to place before an e-mail signature. I have a similar problem with " **sometimes** being auto-replaced by “ which causes havoc when editing shell scripts. **How can I make it stop?** (Interestingly, the em-dash did not happen in the above paragraph!  But it happened every time I created an e-mail sig.) ¹with Unicode Hex Input, which I've made my default keyboard.

I've been looking for an answer to this question for a while, so I'm guessing this can only be solved with a console command. What I want to do is disable 'Text Replacement' everywhere on my Mac. The trick is, I have a library of text replacements that I use on my iPhone (like ill > I'll), and apparently it's synced to my iCloud account. As a result, if I make changes in one place it affects all of my devices everywhere - making the easy solution of "delete all of the text substitutions from your substitution library" is unavailable. The text replacement I'm referring to specifically is the option you can disable by right-clicking on any text input area, then selecting 'Substitutions < Text Replacement' (see image). I know you can disable this one field at a time by right-clicking fields and unchecking 'Text Replacement', but it is enabled by default for every individual input on every field for every application (including the entire internet and my browser's search/address bar), and it periodically gets re-enabled on some inputs. I've already disabled 'Correct Spelling Automatically' from my system text options. (see image) And still I have to disable 'Text Replacement' on every field or it will try to correct my typing with entries in that dictionary. I use iCloud tabs, handoff, and a number of Apple's other "Better Together" features (and I don't want to lose the ability to track my devices with 'Find my [device]'), so I don't want to disassociate my iCloud account from my computer or devices, but I'd be really happy if I never had to disable 'Text Replacement' on an input field again. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated! **EDIT:** I've found https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/217387/172938 and https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/121553/172938 , both of which have some console references: defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool true from the first link (for enabling 'Text Replacement' in Safari). defaults delete -g NSUserDictionaryReplacementItems from the second link (for deleting the User Dictionary *as seen in my second image*). Both pertain to my issue tangentially, but each to the opposite effect I'm looking for.

I know about text shortcuts in Mac OS System Preferences for the Keyboard that can replace input sequences with static text (e.g jd becomes John Doe). And these are useful. But is there a way to achieve the same thing with dynamic output (maybe generated by a simple shell command) I frequently need to insert today's date when writing notes in various apps. If I could convert ddd to sh -c "date -I" so that it inputs today's date, that would be great. I know I can do this with individual apps (e.g. BBEdit, Email, Terminal) but is there a system wide way to achieve this? I'm hoping there's a tool that can intercept system events and invoke executables.

Problem - I type in multiple languages and it bothers me that I have to correct my input if the keyboard is not my expected language. Looking up the input source in the menu bar is not convenient for me. ! Question - Is it possible for the indicator to show up when an input field is focused? Alternatively, is there a way to set up an automation script when an input field is focused?

I have a PDF form where some manager should write down the relevant data. I want to add an text/input field to this PDF file to simplify this process - now it is just printed lines to fill by handwriting. After I add the text field I send the PDF file to the manager. Any suggestions, soft etc are welcome (Right now I have only the Preview and a Google Docs account).

I've got my mac two months ago and there is a problem that kinda bugs me to death. It is related to input languages and composite characters (those made up from more than one character, for example in Bulgarian Phonetic layout, the characters 'a(cyrillic a) produce ђ ). I'm looking for a way to disable this behavior as I almost never (let's say never had to use them) and it gets in the way when I need to type ' followed by some other character - for example when I try to write python comments and I'm in Bulgarian Phonetic, when i type 3 ''' and then press enter for next line, a fourth ' is added and I have to delete it and press enter again. Any ideas on how to disable this behavior. I couldn't find anything on the interwebs, but I believe it's because I can't formulate my search query right, as I don't even know how this feature is called.

Since updating to Sonoma, I have a very weird and annoying problem editing draft emails: - I have a plain text draft email saved. - If i then open it to edit the contents, I can move the cursor around, but if i put it at the beginning of an empty line, it often will ignore all keystrokes. - If I press enter, a new line will be created and the cursor moves down. The input is still blocked, but now the last character pressed will appear on the old line (above the cursor). - Only if I first press space or move to another section in the draft, I can add characters and edit the mail as usually. - It might even be the case, that I can write text to certain lines of the draft, but not others. - The problem does not happen consistently: Sometimes editing drafts works fine, sometimes not. Also, if the problem occurs, it does not happen in all empty lines but only some. Additional info: Pretty much all 'intelligent' features such as spelling correction or the new autocomplete feature are disabled. My keyboard is German. MacOS is 14.2.1 (23C71), but I have had this problem with all versions since upgrading to Sonoma. My hunch is, this might be connected to the url detection feature (not this new, super-annoying 'link preview' feature which I switched off, but just the normal url detection) in Apple mail which somehow might interfere with this new word prediction feature (although the latter is also disabled in the keyboard settings), but this is really just guessing. Any hints anyone?

When I type ⌥→, I'd like my cursor to *stop* at periods, and perhaps other characters. Does anybody know of a defaults configuration, or System Preferences setting, that changes *which characters* are considered to be ‘word characters’ by OS X?

There are many handy shortcuts for exotic characters in Mac such as Option + 7 for ¶ and Option + G for ©. Is there one to yield the command key ('⌘') sign?

I thought I had posted on this some time ago, but four different search strings failed to find the question. Some time ago, my system was frequently changing my input method without warning to Greek. After a few days of tolerating this annoyance, it started trying to force me to use Chinese instead.  After several more days, an O.S. update made it stop.  It has remained on the one I use most for some time. But today, it has changed to Korean several times.  **Every time** I unlock (open the MacBook Pro) it is set to Korean. And when I rebooted and logged in this morning, it was on Korean.  (It was set to my preferred keyboard when I shut down.)  At least once, it changed while I was using the MBP. Since it happens at either logout or login and between physical closing and opening, I do not believe it is from accidentally hitting the shortcut for switching.  (Plus, if my clumsiness were doing that, it would have been happening yesterday.) It's also not caused by software update: the last update ws in November,  I am about to install 14.2.1.  I hope that will fix it, but **it would be nice to know the cause and/or fix for the next time it occurs.**

I have to introduce a large number of small texts into a pdf with preview by CMD-c and CMD-v from a text file through the pdf. Each time I open a new area, the text annotation tool returns to zero opacity (ie transparent) and I have to specify each time that I want a white and opaque text background. How to change this default value? In Preview/Preferences, I don't see anything. From the terminal I only see:

$ defaults read com.apple.Preview | grep -i text
     "com.apple.AnnotationKit.textAttributes" = {length = 261, bytes = 0x7b5c7274 66315c61 6e73695c 616e7369 ... 205c6366 3220617d };

and I do not know how to interpret or modify it so as to have by default an opaque white background in the text area where I want to copy the text taken from my external text file. An other idea ?