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Create iOS-Style Keyboard Shortcuts In OS X
Mar 11, 2025
A quick video about how to create keyboard shortcuts in OS X.
View Video Transcript
0:04
hey everyone today I'm going to show how
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you can create keyboard shortcuts in OS
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10 that work in the same way as they do
0:11
on iOS so you may be familiar with iOS 5
0:15
and the fact that it contains a keyboard
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shortcut option and basically the idea
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behind it is that you can type in a
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phrase that you might type that's just a
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couple letters long and then put a
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sentence or several words in so that
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when once you type the default set of
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letters it will replace it with a phrase
0:35
of your choice so Apple includes an
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example which is on my way which they
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abbreviated with the shortcut OMW so you
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can see how it works and many people
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found this feature in iOS 5 is something
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new uh but actually it's been around in
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Macos 10 for quite a while now and it's
0:51
here in Lion as well and you can
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actually do it but not a lot of people
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know about it because it's kind of
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hidden and off to the side out of the
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way so if you've ever used something
0:58
like text expander this Works in a
1:00
similar way although it is a little bit
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more limited so all you have to do to
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set this up is open up system
1:07
preferences so you can launch this up
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and now in system preferences you're
1:11
going to go into language and text and
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in language and text you have all these
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menus here's all the different languages
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and everything but what you want to do
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is just forget about the rest of that
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and go over to the text Tab and over in
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the text tab this is where you set this
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all up so you can see a list on the side
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here of different shortcuts and there's
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one's automatically included with the OS
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like some of these fractions and things
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like that now if you're interested this
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is also the area in Lon where you can
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turn off uh automatic spelling
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correction so if you don't like auto
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correct you can get rid of that here too
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and there's actually a lot of different
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things within this language and text
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panel that you can change and tweak to
1:49
your liking so you can see here that
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I've already set up a demo shortcut and
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this is like the one that Apple includes
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an iOS where I changed on my way to this
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shortcut all I have to do is type OMW
2:02
but let's say I want to add another one
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and let's say I want this one to be for
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my name so let's say I want to type in
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Ms and then when I type that I wanted to
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replace it with my name so I can do
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something like that and hit enter and
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there you go you have created a shortcut
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and it's really that easy and this is
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actually really handy there's a lot of
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different uses for it that you might not
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know of and one that I've really come to
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love is the fact that you can enter a
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shortcut
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for an email address so for example
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let's say I want to set up a shortcut
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here so let's say when I type in Ms
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email it will replace it with my email
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address so it's really handy and if you
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fill out forms a lot or if you're
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logging in and you know you're using
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emails things like that it's really
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handy that you can just type in a
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shortcut and you don't have to type out
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an entire email address and I find that
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it works really well for a lot of stuff
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like that now another thing thing you
3:00
can do with this and it's new with line
3:02
because there wasn't the Emoji option
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before line is you can set different
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emoticons basically and you can assign
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them to the emoji features in OS 10 so
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let's say I want to do a smiley face now
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if I go over to the input sources tab
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here what I can do is I can select
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keyboard and character viewer and now if
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I go up to your menu bar you'll see that
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it appears and I can select show
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character viewer now this menu that pops
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up here will have all the different
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characters that you can insert so let's
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say I want to go over to text and I want
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a smiley face for this shortcut that I'm
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creating I can go in here and I can drag
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in a smiley
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face and hit enter and there it's
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created that shortcut for me so now
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whenever I type a smiley face it'll
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replace it with the emote account if you
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want to test these out to make sure that
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they're working correctly you can open
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up text edit over here and you can try
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them out so let's say I try on my way
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just like the one that Apple has an iOS
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now as soon as I hit
4:06
space bam it turns into on my way and I
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can do the same thing for my name so Ms
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turns into my name and Ms email turns
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into my email address and then of course
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the smiley face that I set up turns into
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the emoticon smiley face so there you go
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and it's just like the way it works in
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iOS it's a little bit more limited than
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something like text expander but it is
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very handy built right into the OS a lot
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of people don't know about it so I
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thought I'd share it with you today so
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there you go that's how you can set up
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iOS style keyboard shortcuts right
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within Mac os10 if you have anything
4:38
that you'd like to see me do how 2 on
4:40
make sure to send me an email I hope you
4:41
found this video useful thank you for
4:43
watching
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