Systemwide or appwide autocomplete / predictive text for macOS?

Software
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I find myself typing the same things over and over (and over). Not phrases that I can turn into a template in e.g. Typinator, but the same words.
Since my computer is idle the majority of the time, waiting patiently as I bang out the same words, it would seem that a context-sensitive autocomplete app would be doable.

Either systemwide and/or app-specific completions.

I’m kind of doing this manually with Typinator, which I mentioned somewhere else, but there should be something more automated.

Have I missed such an animal?

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Doesn’t this exist in the MacBook Pro laptops with Touch Bar? And some of my plain text editors on iOS offer word suggestions. None of these are as full featured as auto completion you’ll find in a programming platform’s IDE. But programming is a more restricted and structured domain and easier to guess what might be coming next.

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I hear in some places that you can rent chimpanzees from the local zoo at a relatively low cost. With enough time, you can expect them to type a Shakespeare play. So renting them to provide you with the same words that you are otherwise typing over and over again should cost just a few pennies on the dollar.

Seriously though, I am a bit confused if not worried about your intent. I’d go a bit batty with an app that proposes automatically to complete words that I supposedly type over and over again based on some AI guessing. How should it recognize “the” from “theory”? Or “an” from “anticipate”? What do you really mean by “context sensitive”? Only when you tilt your head to the left, for example?

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JJW

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Pretty sure TextExpander has this feature…(unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re looking for). TextExpander does have the ability for shortcuts work only when in the context or a particular app or group of apps.

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Thanks!

That’s an idea. Maybe jump into a “programming” editor for some of my writing. If anything would have this capability, it would be EMACS.

Me typing, vertical bar is the cursor:
What is the|ory
theory is the suggestion
the␣ is “the” (would have hit space anyway, so zero cost)
the↩ accepts “theory” and adds a space, also zero cost.

Context of the document (ideally), folder the document is in (also ideal) or app, where I’ve typed words repeatedly. So “tra” might suggest “translate” in one document, and “transport” in another. Dreaming a bit, in a different folder of notes, it might suggest “transition” based on the 37 times I’ve typed that word among the 28 notes in the folder.

That might be what I end up doing manually (using Typinator). I was looking for something more automatic though. Kind of like the predictive text on iOS.

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I see. In my case, by the time I remember that I should now parse the options offered and correspondingly think about what response is correct and correspondingly make that choice (e.g. scroll through the list that has theory and theoretical and thespian and …), I have typed the word and moved on.

Within the realm of why it exists on one and not the other, you have birds of two different feathers (or some such quote). Touch typing on a (ergonomic) keyboard to a computer (desktop or laptop) is a world away from any kind of typing experience on an iPad screen.

I see your goal however. As noted, it is not one I would easily embrace, but certainly it is one that should be (more) easily realizable or realized.

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JJW

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Touchbar Macs have typing suggestions.

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A few you might test:

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Thanks!
A couple of “almosts” there :slightly_smiling_face:

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