For macOS · lives in your menu bar
Abbreviate! watches for your own shorthand as you type — in Mail, Slack, a terminal, anywhere — and swaps it for the real thing the instant you finish typing it.
No account. No subscription. Just your Mac.
How it works
Define it once — omw, sig, whatever you'll actually remember — then just type it normally, anywhere.
A space, a period, a comma, Return, or Tab tells Abbreviate! you're done. Nothing fires while you're still typing or fixing a typo.
The shorthand is replaced instantly, in place — no popup to click, no menu to open.
Features
The details that matter more once you're typing fast and not thinking about the tool at all.
System-wide expansion in any Mac app — Mail, Messages, your browser, a code editor — not just one editor of its own.
om won't fire while you're typing "omelet," and it won't sneak out of the end of "axiom" either.
Define btw lowercase; typing Btw at the start of a sentence still expands, capitalized correctly.
An expansion isn't limited to one line — store a full signature, a mailing address, or a boilerplate reply.
Drop real emoji into any expansion, straight from the built-in picker — no separate keyboard shortcut to remember.
No Dock icon, no window cluttering your desktop. Left-click for your list, right-click for everything else.
Define co once; typing cos becomes "companies" on its own, using real spelling rules — not just a bolted-on "s".
Group abbreviations into named sets — Email, Work, whatever fits — then export one as a file to move it to another Mac or hand it to someone else.
FAQ
Sort of — but it's built for short, exact-match phrases. Its replacement field is a single line, so a signature or a mailing address doesn't fit. It only expands on an exact case match, so a shortcut you defined lowercase won't fire if you capitalize it at the start of a sentence. And it's noticeably unreliable in apps that manage their own text fields, like Chrome, Slack, or VS Code.
Abbreviate! reads your actual keystrokes rather than going through the system's text-substitution service, so it works the same way in every app, handles paragraph-length expansions, and matches capitalization automatically.
Dictation is good for getting something new down, but it doesn't save you from saying the same thing twice — you'd still have to speak an entire severability clause, a "vital signs are within normal limits" line, or a doc-comment stub out loud, every single time. And even inside something you're actually composing fresh, there are usually a few phrases worth a shortcut anyway — a case citation, a standard finding, a recurring function signature.
Not automatically — each Mac keeps its own list, and a license is active on one Mac at a time. Moving to a new Mac just means activating your license there instead of on the old one.
It needs Accessibility access to watch for and replace text system-wide — that's how any expander works — but it only acts when what you've typed matches one of your own abbreviations. Nothing you type is stored, logged, or sent anywhere. The one exception is Send Feedback, which sends only the message you write.
Pricing
Every feature is unlocked during the trial — nothing to configure, nothing crippled.
One-time purchase, unlocked after your trial.