How to stop TypeIt4Me from typing stuff for you

There may be times when you don’t want TypeIt4Me to expand your abbreviations. Perhaps you just want to block a single expansion as a one-off, or temporarily pause expansion for a few minutes. Maybe you’d like to limit the apps TypeIt4Me works in, because it gets in your way when you’re doctoring pictures of Elon Musk in Photoshop. You might even find it’s sometimes necessary to disable expansion indefinitely, across the board, for some weird reason. The good news is you can do all of that and it’s pretty straightforward. Read on for a rundown of your options.

One-off keyboard expansion blocking

Imagine your name is Gerry Dale Pinkerton. You need to type your initials, GDP, in a web form. But…wait, you’re an economist! There happens to be a ‘GDP’ abbreviation in your TypeIt4Me snippet library that becomes ‘gross domestic product’ when it expands. You don’t want that to be typed when you enter your initials.

To prevent the GDP abbreviation from expanding, all you have to do is type GDP and then hold the shift key at the same time that you press your expansion trigger. That’s it. …Of course, if you don’t use triggers, you can’t use this method, but thankfully TypeIt4Me has other tricks up its sleeve.

Temporarily pause TypeIt4Me

Another quick way to stop TypeIt4Me expanding your abbreviations is to put it in pause mode. To do this, you can do one of the following:

Click on TypeIt4Me in the menu bar and select Pause from the menu.
Control-click, long-click or two-finger click on TypeIt4Me in the Dock and select Pause from the menu.
Use a keyboard shortcut to pause TypeIt4Me (you can define one in the Hot Keys section of the app’s settings).

When TypeIt4Me is in pause mode, any abbreviations you type will not expand and you will see a little pause (“) symbol on its icon in the menu bar. To unpause TypeIt4Me, do one of the following:

Click on TypeIt4Me in the menu bar and select Resume from the menu.
Control-click, long-click or two-finger click on TypeIt4Me in the Dock and select Resume from the menu.
Use a keyboard shortcut to unpause TypeIt4Me (you can define one in the Hot Keys section of the app’s settings). The same shortcut both pauses and resumes expansion, i.e. it works as a toggle.

*You may notice that the little pause symbol appears automatically on the TypeIt4Me menu bar icon whenever you’re editing a snippet in the app. In other words, expansion is disabled when working in the app itself. That’s to avoid getting into confusing situations that would make even Christopher Nolan scratch his head.

Disable keyboard expansion indefinitely

What if you want to completely turn off expansion of typed abbreviations? No problem. There’s a simple way to do that. Open TypeIt4Me’s settings, click on the Expansion tab and click the checkbox labelled “Disable keyboard expansion.” It does exactly what it says on the tin. For as long as that checkbox remains ticked, you can type your defined abbreviations as many times as you want, anywhere you like and they will not expand. At all. You will still be able to use the point-and-click menu, though.

Disable TypeIt4Me expansion only in specific apps

Some people find that TypeIt4Me can be more of a hindrance than a help when using certain specific applications. If you’re one of those people, you’ll be pleased to learn that you can instruct TypeIt4Me never to expand abbreviations in one or more apps that you specify. To do that:

Open TypeIt4Me’s settings
Click on the App Rules tab.
Command-click on the apps you don’t want TypeIt4Me to work in
Click the little rightward-pointing arrow to move them to the “Don’t expand in these apps…” list. That’s it, you’re done.