Is There an Automated Way to Import Apple Keyboard Text Replacement Shortcuts Into KM?

[ccstone]

@majorgear

Is there any automated way to do this?

Hey @majorgear,

No. Keyboard Maestro has no built-in importer for Text Substitutions.

But – can it be done? Sure.

• Open the Keyboard Preferences and switch to the Text panel.
• Select all of your Text Substitutions.
• Drag them out onto the Desktop.
• This produces a ‘Text Substitutions.plist’ file.

Run this macro to extract all of the Substitution/Shortcut pairs. Copy from the pop-up window and paste into TextEdit, BBEdit, or your favorite text editor.

Extract Text Replacement-Shortcut Pairs from a Text Substitutions Plist on the Desktop 1.00.kmmacros (6.0 KB)

Here's how to use that information to create new Text Expansion macros in Keyboard Maestro:

Create Text Expansions Macro

Here is a macro that lets you create simple text expansion macros. Simply fill in the text of the action with lines like: trigger:text where trigger is the Typed String trigger you want and text is the text you want to expand to. Then select all the actions and click the Try button at the bottom to run them once and it will create a macro for each expansion. There is no trigger on the macro since its not going to be a macro you want to run except occasionally. Note that to create a new exp…

-Chris