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Hey

This is a quick and dirty Terminal trick which cropped up on my day to to day travels as I surfed the web. If you are familiar with text substitutions at all, you will realise you can replace (c) with the copyright symbol © as you type. This is quite useful for people who know and use the shortcuts on a regular basis. Enabling these feature globally so it runs on every app is very simple and only needs a Terminal command.

To enable this function, open Terminal in Utilities. Copy and paste the following into the Terminal window and press enter.

defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool true;
defaults write -g WebAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool true;
defaults write -g WebContinuousSpellCheckingEnabled -bool true;

This will enable text replace as mentioned in the introduction, change dashes correctly (i.e a double dash –, to an em dash), finally the last option will enable spell checking. Nifty.

The features will take effect as your restart the applications. Its not fully supported by 100% apps on your system, it mostly effects Cocoa  apps. To make sure everything is running the latest code, restart your system and notice the subtle changes.

If you want to reverse the process for any reason copy and paste the following into Terminal and press enter.

defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool false;
defaults write -g WebAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool false;
defaults write -g WebContinuousSpellCheckingEnabled -bool false;

The effects should then be reversed. If you have any similar tricks, please leave a comment below.

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