Snippets on your Mac, iPhone and iPad

On a Mac, your snippets can live in Apple's own text replacements too, so they work in Mail, Notes and most Mac apps, and through iCloud on your iPhone and iPad. This works on every plan.

Connect your Mac

1. In your Bettertext dashboard, open Snippets. The Connect your Mac card shows a pairing code and one command.
2. Copy the command and run it in Terminal on your Mac. It needs Node.js. The code works once, for 15 minutes.
3. Wait a moment until the card finds your Mac. The Bettertext program keeps running after the Mac restarts.

Already paired a Mac for Agents? It's the same program, so it shows up here without a new code.

Bring in what you already have

Once your Mac is connected, Bettertext reads the text replacements already on it and offers to import them. From then on the two lists stay in sync both ways: a snippet you add or edit in Bettertext appears on your Mac, and a text replacement you add in System Settings › Keyboard › Text Replacements appears in Bettertext. iCloud takes them on to your iPhone and iPad.

Each snippet has a Sync to Apple devices switch in the editor. Turn it off for a snippet you only want in Chrome. The Apple icon at the end of a row shows which ones sync.

What's different on Apple devices

• Apple expands a text replacement after a space or punctuation.
• Fill-ins such as {name} stay exactly as written, because Apple can't ask for a value.
• A snippet with variants syncs as one snippet per variant, like ;sig-importify. You can rename those shortcuts in the editor. See Fill-ins and variants.

Use snippets everywhere on your Mac

Apple's text replacements don't work in some apps, such as Terminal and other terminals, code editors, Slack, Discord, Notion, Linear and Firefox. To use your snippets there too:

1. In Snippets, find Use snippets everywhere on your Macs and click Turn on next to the Mac.
2. Bettertext installs Espanso, a free, open-source app made by another team, and gives it your snippets. What gets installed shows the details.
3. macOS asks once to allow Espanso under System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility. Allow it.

Espanso runs only on that Mac and sends nothing to Bettertext. It's used only in those apps, so nothing expands twice. Turn off stops it. Using more than one Mac? Turn it on for each one.