Sticky Keys on Mac Mini with MacOS Sonoma (14.6.1)

Bob is telling you the correct answer, but you are stuck on wording, "replace" vs "insert", and thus you seem to disregard it.

You type some characters and they are instantly "replaced" by the words you want to "insert".

It can be Option-z if you like!

Option-z in the US layout would type a capital Ω but now it will produce "me@mycompany.com":

(This is set in System Settings->Keyboard)

How is that not what you were asking?

tcarder wrote:

(like command-f10 or control-0)

It’s not done on a Mac with things like that, but by replacing a short letter text with the longer one you want.

There might be 3rd party apps which could use cmd or control sequences for it.

Text Replacement (Mac/iPhone/iPad)

Mac -> System Settings -> Keyboard -> Text Replacement

iPhone/iPad -> Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Text Replacement

I create Text Replacement entries which I can easily insert into a reply (2,000 char max). ONLY UTF-8 plain text characters & emoji (no bold, italics, pictures, etc...)

iCloud can sync Text Replacements with your other Apple devices.

I use Mac TextEdit -> Format (menu) -> “Plain Text” to edit my replacement. Then Copy & Paste into the Text Replacement “With” field.

To avoid accidental replacement, most of my triggers have a leading comma. For example:

• ,bluetooth - Explains how to reset Mac Bluetooth

• ,safe - Explains how to boot Mac into Safe mode

• teh - replace with “the” (yes I do typo replacements)

• im - replace with “I’m” (contraction replacements)

• ,carrier - replace with “https://www.apple.com/watch/cellular”, useful in a browser

An Apple Support Community trick (https://discussions.apple.com). If you select and Cut a URL and then Paste it right back, it will change into a clickable website description. If the URL is on its own line, you can triple click (iPhone/iPad it is a triple tap) to select the entire URL.

If a reply needs a picture, I keep them in an easy to access Mac folder, or an iPhone/iPad Photos Album.

I can search for triggers in the Mac Text Replacement dialog box, by just typing the trigger phrase. For example: ,safe will quickly find my entry on Safe mode. But the funny thing is, the entry I’m searching for is just below the bottom edge of the window, so I have to scroll up to see it. A bit annoying, but once you know this, it is handy way to quickly get to the trigger you want to update.

NOTE: Text Replacement works most places, but there are exceptions. Mac Terminal for example, which annoys me, as my day job involves spending most of my time using a terminal emulator.

See: Change Keyboard settings for accessibility on Mac - Apple Support

Yes. Wrong question. You want to set up Text Replacements in System Settings > Keyboard.

See Replace text and punctuation in documents on Mac - Apple Support

tcarder wrote:

The image on my system is with a white background

In case you get tired of white, here is where you can change that

Just to add, the current version of Sonoma is 14.7.2. You should update.

Do you want Text Replacement?

System Settings-> Keyboard-> Text Replacement-> [+]

I use “bob@“ as my trigger, and this gets replaced with my full email address.