Hey there,
Fat fingers here, and I commonly mistype some words. I know I should make the effort to type correctly, but sometimes when I am in the flow it just happens that I write ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’ or ‘adn’ instead of ‘and’ (and many others). I’ve been adding such things as substitutions (and things like arent to aren’t), but each time it’s multiple clicks to get to the substitution’s menu. Any chance we could get a shortcut to it via the right-click pop-up menu?
Cheers
Hi 
Add teh and adn and it’ll auto fix it for the and and.
You can add anything that may accommodate you.
Indeed, I am aware of all this and have been adding things this way. My issue is that it’s 4 clicks minimum and a lot of mouse movement to get to the point where I can add a substitution. It’d be nice to do it in less clicks and without having to hunt through menus.
Ah… I see. (I thought you meant after the fact, to find the right spelling in the suggestions.)
. . . . . . . . . . .
But I don’t see how it could really be improved. You’d still have to specify replace what or by what, even if it was a right click thing.
Ideally a right click on a misspelled word would have an ‘add substitution’ option that when pressed, pre-fills in the ‘replace’ text leaving you to just add the corrected text. Two clicks, less typing, and done.
What I still (or now) don’t understand, though, is that if the word is misspelled, a single right-click should propose the right spelling.
Why don’t you use that instead ?
Because I want to substitute things I commonly mistype? I have 100,000 words in what I am writing. If I only wrote ‘adn’ instead of ‘and’ in 0.1% of cases, it’d be a heck of a lot of spelling correction to work through. I have no problem with doing that for words I rarely misspell, but I don’t want to do it for ones I commonly do, hence using the ‘substitutions’ feature for that. And yes, I am also aware I could do a search and replace to bulk do it.
All I am suggesting is that the ‘Edit Substitutions’ process could be made significantly faster and better for very little coding effort.
Meanwhile, perhaps one of these has a shortcut for quick adding a substitution from pre-existing text ?
Maybe, but I’m more likely to go back to Word than have to patch the software myself.
Isn’t this what the “correct spelling as you type” function is for?
You’ll find it on the Corrections/Spelling tab in the screenshot @Vincent_Vincent posted.
Hmm… Yeah.
I think I need sleep. lol
Not had a look at that (I must have missed it in the tutorials) but will give it a go and report back. Cheers.
So that was turned off. Turned it on and temporarily disabled the substitutions to try it out. Although it does definitely improve the old adn->and situation, it can’t seem to handle missing apostrophes, So arent ends up autocorrecting to arena instead of aren’t, didnt to didst (which seems weird all round) instead of didn’t, itd to its instead of it’d.
So it fixes one problem but makes another much worse. I’d far prefer to see a squiggly line under didnt than have it change it to another unrelated word. Do you know if there’s any apostrophe correction setting?
On the Mac, there are a number of apps to enter text in response to a trigger. The main intention is to enter long, standard stretches of text, but you can set them to auto correct ‘teh’ to ‘the’, ‘adn’ to ‘and’ etc. Importantly, they are usually triggered when ‘Space’ is pressed eliminating most unwanted substitutions. There must be similar apps available for Windows.
I find that my typo quotient reduces when not looking at the keyboard but instead up at the screen while I touch type — a skill learned decades ago when still a school. Touch typing also decreases my other typing mistakes, such as omitting not, because my typing speed exceeds my thinking speed. I am not concerned with where my fingers are stabbing on the keyboard. And yes I have even managed to touch type on the virtual keyboard of my iPad including my venerable iPad2.
While typing this had a text message come in and you do not want to see the mistakes I made while one-fingered typing on my iPhone. I have started to answer text messages using Siri but she adds another level of potential mistakes.
Well there may be, but I’m not installing / buying another app to do that when I already have Word (and I’ve already had to install Grammerly). Scrivener gives me a couple of features that are useful beyond a word processor (mainly having all my documents in one place and the export options), but if it doesn’t handle the basic word processing part then I’ll just leave it after the free trial.
EDIT: As a new commenter, I was unable to post again for 24 hours. Now that I can, I should say I have decided it’s just not for me. Back to Word and productivity!
That’s no longer “correcting” ; I’d rather call it “compensating” at this point.
If word does it for you, arent → aren’t, well, good.
But if productivity was really your goal, you’d learn to type properly, I would think. (?)
It almost looks as if you came here with the current outcome already in mind.
As for the record, I fail to see how combining auto-correct and substitutions couldn’t get you what you want. (Likely you didn’t even try.)
P.S. Use whatever app makes you happy. That’s kind of the only thing that truly matters.
No need to call me a liar. Yes I did try, as I said. No need to white knight the software.
‘Correcting spelling as I type’ results in incorrect substitutions (as detailed on many other comments) unless I swap out the dictionary for one that works. It especially cannot handle contractions.
There’s no grammar checker so I needed to install Grammerly. That works fine, but a pain to have to get a third party add on for basic word processing functionality.
The substitutions do work, but not for whole words. By that I mean that if I try to substitute a few letters for another word, that combination of letters in any place in the document gets substituted. What should happen is substitutions should only occur for completed words (so when you type the letters and press space or add a comma etc.).
I’m hardly the first to have these issues, have a look around the internet and see how many struggle. Especially with the poor dictionary. Multiple people have guides online on how to swap it out, it’s that bad.
Anyway, I gave it a good go over a week, it didn’t work for me. Nothing lost, so you don’t need to get upset nor reply as I’m outta here 
