[MlMt] Emergency: can't disable the elipses character :|

Sherif Soliman sherif at ssoliman.com
Thu Jun 18 18:36:07 EDT 2015


On 17 Jun 2015, at 10:54, Bill Cole wrote:

> On 17 Jun 2015, at 10:25, Mark Wadham wrote:
>
>> If I type three dots I get an elipses character: …
>>
>> This is abhorrant and crazy-making, how can I make it stop?
>>
>> It’s not happening in any other applications.
>>
>> Sysprefs -> Text -> Correct spelling automatically is off
>> Sysprefs -> Text -> Use smart quotes and dashes is off
>> Spelling is set to “British English”
>>
>> If I add an autocorrect item mapping three dots back to three dots it 
>> still happens.
>>
>> I can’t see any options in MailMate prefs that seem related to 
>> this.
>>
>> Please help before I go crazy and trash the office?
>
> Two clues:
>
> 1. As a member of the Church of 7-Bit ASCII (a.k.a. the "Email As GOD 
> INTENDED" faithful...) I somehow managed to kill off all text 
> replacement with non-textual abominations entirely everywhere in 
> MailMate years ago. Unfortunately, I can no longer recall HOW I did 
> this, because I am of an age that is only slightly below that of the 
> Holy Church's median, but have hope: there is SOME way to make it the 
> default.
>
> 2. In trying to *force* MM to do the 3-dot -> ellipsis replacement, I 
> found that it is part of the "Smart Dashes" feature which apparently 
> is controlled on a per-editing-window basis (!) by the "Substitutions" 
> submenu of the Edit menu or context menu (ctrl-click or right-click). 
> So a workaround for your problem would be to turn it off in every new 
> message.
>

I also fought with the ellipses replacement in many applications, not 
just MailMate, and wanted to share my experience as an alternative 
workaround, if it's needed.

The solution that worked for me (and it _is_ fairly hacky/inelegant), 
was to add a replacement pair in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text 
that replaces "..." with "...", where both of those are just three dots, 
not some messed up ellipses character.

I should note that even deleting the original pair where OS X would 
replace three dots with the ellipses didn't stop it from happening. The 
only thing that worked for me was adding the "..." to "..."

S


More information about the mailmate mailing list