With the future of TextExpander touch uncertain, I started to look into Apple’s own basic keyboard shortcut system built in to OS X and iOS. With Mavericks and iOS, these shortcuts can synced via iCloud’s vaguely-named “Documents & Data” feature.
While Apple’s tool doesn’t allow for the complexity that TextExpander offers, for simple stuff, I though it’d be fine.
Sadly, the feature is half-baked.
While shortcuts created on iOS sync to OS X, those created on Mavericks aren’t pushed back to mobile devices, as seen in these screenshots:
While this doesn’t rule Apple’s system out as a semi-replacement for TextExpander, entering my mission-critical snippets via iOS doesn’t sound like much fun at all. Moreover, it’s yet another example of Apple being sloppy around the edges of its software products.
Update: According to lots of people on Twitter, bi-directional sync does work here, but even after nuking my com~apple~TextInput iCloud container, I can’t get it to work. I’ll update again if I can jumpstart it.