Help · AI

Suggestions & Reminders

Shorthand can notice phrases you type again and again and offer to make them snippets, and remind you when you type out a snippet the long way. Both are off until you turn them on.

To turn them on

Open Settings ▸ Options.
Under Suggestions, turn on either or both:
- Suggest snippets based on my typing habits
- Remind me when I type out a snippet instead of its abbreviation
For suggestions, choose how often a phrase must be typed: Suggest after typing a phrase 3 times (from 2 to 10).

Snippet suggestions

When you’ve typed the same phrase enough times, a notice appears: 💡 You often type “…”. Make it a snippet?

Click Add Abbreviation… in the notice. The main window opens with the phrase selected.
Type an abbreviation for it. That’s it: it’s now a working snippet.
Optionally move it to another group with the Group: menu.

Missed the notice? Suggestions wait in a group called Suggested Snippets. The menu bar icon shows 💡 3 Snippet Suggestions… (or however many there are) to jump straight there.

What counts as a phrase

Text you type that ends with Return, Tab, or Esc, or a sentence ending in . ! or ? followed by a space.
At least 15 characters and three words, and at most 300 characters. Short words and one-off fragments are ignored.
Only in apps where your default expansion rules allow Shorthand to work (Settings ▸ Expansion ▸ Expand snippet groups in).
Phrases that are already the text of a snippet aren’t suggested.
Clicking, using arrow keys, or switching apps starts a new phrase.

Don’t want a suggestion?

Delete it from the Suggested Snippets group. Shorthand remembers that and never suggests that phrase again. To clear that memory, click Forget … dismissed suggestions in Settings ▸ Options.

Reminders

If you type out the full text of a snippet by hand, a short notice says 💡 Shortcut: type “abbreviation” for that.

Only for plain-text snippets without any % codes, between 8 and 200 characters long.
At most once every 10 minutes for the same snippet, so it doesn’t nag.

Privacy

To count repeats, Shorthand keeps only a one-way fingerprint of each phrase, in memory, and forgets them all when it quits. The words themselves are saved only when a phrase reaches your threshold and becomes a suggestion in your library. Nothing is sent anywhere, and AI is not involved.

Because a suggestion is saved as ordinary text in your library, be careful if you often type private details such as account numbers; leave suggestions off, or delete such suggestions.