David Sparks recently wrote an article on his usage of TextExpander in Omnifocus. In it, he writes about curiosities regarding the iOS shortcut system.

For reasons beyond me, the snippet cannot start with a period (.), so I start them with an “x”. Moreover, you can’t simply insert the cursor at the beginning of some text and expand. There must be a leading space.

From what I’ve seen, this is because iOS shortcuts are implemented by shoehorning them into the autocorrect system. This explains a number of things.

  1. A shortcut can’t contain certain punctuation (period, question mark, space, quote, etc.), as this ends a word and activates a prompted autocorrect.

  2. A shortcut doesn’t require an actual shortcut to expand (only a phrase), as this just adds the phrase to the autocorrect dictionary.

iPad Shortcut Dialog

It’s a pity that we don’t have system-wide TextExpander support, but hopefully it will at least be available via Omnifocus on iOS in the near future.