I use text replacement and my iPhone and these are syncing to my Mac via iCloud. But I don't want to use them on my Mac because I use TextExpander. How can I prevent the text replacement on my Mac but keep the text replacement on my iPhone?
Text replacement can be accessed via System Preferences > Keyboard > Text
Below is a screenshot of the text replacement list in System Preferences.
To disable this globally on your Mac, you'll use need to use the defaults command(see here for more info). This command only applies to your macOS. Open the terminal(see here if you don't know how to open terminal) and type:
defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool false
and to enable it again, you can just switch the last word to true and type the whole thing in the terminal again:
defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool true
You can also disable text replacement on an app-by-app basis by having the app open(let's say Safari), then up in the menu clicking the Edit > Substitutions then unchecking Text Replacement.
More information found in this article.
defaults command is used to edit the .plist files directly(which hold all possible config files for an app) so it should persist after you logout, shutdown, etc. It's odd that it would suddenly revert globally after 20 days. Are there any system changes that happened recently? Updates on an app or OS-level? Pragmatically speaking, if you run the same command above again, does it turn it off like it did before? If so, let me know, and I'll update my answer with a way to run that command automatically in the background so you don't need to worry about it again, i.e. crontab
defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool false then pasted it into the terminal and hit enter. Then tried text replacement and it continues to work. Any suggestions?
defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool false and rebooting does not disable text replacement for me on macOS 14.5 Sonoma.