Trying to figure out which plist file to restore for text shortcuts

Question

Trying to figure out which plist file to restore for text shortcuts

Long story short: I had a series of custom text shortcuts in System Preferences for multilingual support that are now MIA, but the rest of my text shortcuts are there for some reason. Change would've had to have happened in the past week, but I do daily Time Machine backups so that's not a huge issue. Basically I just am trying to figure out which plist file to restore so I can restore only the customized text shortcuts and not a full Time Machine restore.

Full Stats: Macbook Pro 15" Mid 2015 running macOS 10.14.4

For added context, since someone will probably ask: I like to learn languages, and some of the ones I use have different character sets than English. If I want to just do something simple with someone I'm talking with, that doesn't require completely switching the keyboard, I'll just do something like \congrats-heb which "corrects" to מזל טוב and so on. I basically had a lengthly list of non-English character set language "cheat codes" for common phrases I found myself using that I would prefer not to recreate from scratch.

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.14

Posted on Apr 1, 2019 6:32 PM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

123,750 points

Apr 1, 2019 7:15 PM in response to nonpareilpearl

It's the user's global preferences.

You can view it with the defaults command,

defaults read -g

The file is ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

Note the . preceding the file name (which makes it invisible in the Finder).

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Answer 2

Apr 10, 2019 11:45 AM in response to Barney-15E

Following up: running the command that you suggested definitely displays the current configuration. I can open the plist file with vim in both my system and it's current backup in Time Machine. When I go back to earlier backups, though, the older plist files (from earlier this month, last month, etc.) don't seem to have any of the keyboard shortcuts in them when I open them in vim. I did wonder if part of this might be the binary format of the file, even though I'm able to open the most recent version 🤔

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Answer 3

Apr 10, 2019 12:13 PM in response to nonpareilpearl

Another quick follow up: used Xcode instead of vim to actually see the files. Looks like the latest version of the plist is much more complete, notably including NSUserDictionaryReplacementItems, whereas the Time Machine back up files don't. Did this happen to be elsewhere?

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Answer 4

Barney-15E

Level 10

123,750 points

Apr 10, 2019 4:04 PM in response to nonpareilpearl

I don't know the answer to those questions.

At some point, the shortcuts were sync'd with iOS shortcuts. I don't know when that happened, but it was several versions ago.

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Trying to figure out which plist file to restore for text shortcuts

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