Why you should always use a hyphen prefix for shortcuts

The accidental expansion problem

Imagine you've created a shortcut hi that expands to "Hello! How can I help you today?" You're typing an email that starts with "Hi there, I wanted to follow up on..." and suddenly your email reads:

Hello! How can I help you today? there, I wanted to follow up on...

This happens because text expanders can't distinguish between "hi" as a shortcut you meant to trigger and "hi" as a normal word you happened to type. Any time you type those two letters followed by a space, anywhere, the expansion fires.

This is one of the most common frustrations with text expanders, and it drives people away from using them entirely. But there's a simple fix.

The hyphen prefix

Name your shortcut -hi instead of hi.

That single character changes everything. Here's why it works: hyphens almost never appear at the start of a word in normal typing. You might write "well-designed" or "self-aware" — but you never start a natural word with a hyphen. The hyphen is a signal to yourself and to SmartText: this is intentional.

Now you can type "hi there" all day long without any expansion. When you actually want the greeting to expand, you type -hi + Space, and it fires perfectly.

The convention in practice

Here's how the same shortcuts look with and without the hyphen prefix:

SmartText follows this by default

All of SmartText's built-in shortcuts and Template Library packs use the hyphen convention. When you install the HR & Recruiting pack, you get -shortlist, -reject, -schedint. The onboarding guide explains the convention in step 2. The shortcut editor placeholder shows -ty, -sig, -addr as examples.

We recommend you follow the same convention for every shortcut you create. It takes getting used to for about a day, and then it becomes completely natural — and you never accidentally expand a shortcut again.

One more tip

For shortcuts you use very frequently, consider even shorter hyphen-prefixed keys. -t for a standard thank you, -s for your signature, -a for your address. The hyphen prevents collisions even with single-letter shortcuts, which would be completely unusable without it.

The rule is simple: every shortcut starts with a hyphen. Build that habit and SmartText will feel effortless.