comparison

MacAutocomplete vs TextExpander

They look similar — text appears as you type — but they do different jobs. TextExpander plays back snippets you wrote earlier. MacAutocomplete predicts the sentence you're writing right now, one you never templated and never could.

Two different jobs

TextExpander is an expander: you save a block of text, give it a trigger abbreviation like ;sig, and typing that trigger swaps in the saved block. It's perfect for things you say verbatim again and again — your address, a support reply, a code boilerplate, a meeting link. The text is identical every time because you decided it would be.

MacAutocomplete is a predictor. It reads what you've typed so far and proposes the rest as greyed ghost text at your cursor:

Sorry for the delay — I wanted to double-check the figures before I sent these over.

You never wrote that sentence before, and you'd never have made a snippet for it. Press ⇥ Tabto accept, or keep typing to ignore it. That's the part a trigger-based expander structurally can't do: predict prose that's unique to this message.

Honest comparison

They're complementary, not rivals

You can run both. Keep TextExpander for the fixed blocks you fire on purpose — signatures, canned replies, snippets of code. Let MacAutocomplete fill the gaps between them with the one-off sentences you couldn't have templated. Drop in your ;sig snippet, then let the ghost finish the personal line above it.

Where MacAutocomplete pulls ahead on its own job is reach and privacy. It predicts in standard text fields across Mail, Slack, Notes, Messages, and most browsers and chat apps — not just inside one editor. And because the model runs locally on Apple Silicon, there is zero outbound network for completions; you can confirm that yourself with Little Snitch. Password and secure fields are never read. (Honest dead zones: Google Docs and Sheets canvas, some GPU/canvas editors, and games.)

Which should you reach for?

If the exact text is the same every time and you want it on demand, that's an expander's job. If the text is different every time and you want it offered to you as you write, that's prediction. See how accepting works with Tab to accept, or how it reads when you're writing email — the place most people first feel the difference.

Frequently asked questions