Text expanders generally work best when you have to repeatedly type long passages of text, such as a welcome paragraph at the beginning of an email or your own postal address, and you just want to type something far shorter. To make those symbols appear in the text above, all I had to do was type “:ctrl”, “:alt” or “:eject” (without the speech marks), because I’m running a piece of software on my Mac called Espanso, which is a text expander.Ī text expander basically allows you to type a shortcut command (such as “:cmd”) and have that automatically replaced with something else entirely, such as the ⌘ symbol. If you (ahem) run a technical support website or have some other regular need to type ⌘, as well as other well-known Mac symbols such as ⌃ (control) or ⌥ (alt) or even ⏏ (eject), then I suggest you take a different tack entirely. If you need something that works every time, can I suggest you… Get the Espanso text expander Microsoft Office apps, for example, unhelpfully refuse to co-operate. Note that Apple text replacements don’t work in every app. To create that replacement for yourself, click the + button in the bottom-left of the window, then enter “cmmnd” (or whatever you want the shortcut text to be) in the Replace section and then copy the ⌘ symbol into the With section. That isn’t an Apple default, but one I prepared earlier. You might also have spotted the ⌘ symbol in that list in the screenshot above. Alternatively, just press the space bar after typing “appsy” and it will automatically appear. So, if you type the word “appsy” in a Mac app, you should see a little apple appear above the word, which you can just click on to have it replace that word in text. The sharper tools in the box may have spotted the Apple symbol in the list.

Copy paste command in mac