Best practices for shortcut triggers & abbreviations

Summoning your shortcuts

First things first, when using Magical, there are two ways to summon your shortcut, you can either:

1. Type // into the text field or input box to view a dropdown of all of your shortcuts (note, you will see all of your shortcuts and preview body of text). Simply search for the shortcut, select the shortcut, and hit enter to pull it up.
2. Type in the shortcut directly into the text field or input box to summon it

Best practices for shortcut triggers & abbreviations

If you plan on pulling up your shortcuts using Option #2, we recommend  picking a shortcut name that you don't commonly type so that you don't expand your text accidentally. Ideas below have been sourced by our community.

Start with a symbol

The most common symbols users start their shortcuts with are the exclamation mark ! or the # symbol. 

🚧 Avoid using // as it's a Magical command to provoke the search dropdown. We also do not recommend using @ as apps like Gmail, Notion, Slack, and Outlook use @ to tag an individual.

I start all of my shortcuts with the exclamation mark. For example, my shortcut !hi will expand out into a greeting to my customers - Julie, Customer Support Rep

Start with a punctuation mark

Many users indicated that they use either a semicolon ; or tilde ~ to distinguish their shortcuts.

I've experimented a lot and found that I like using ; for my shortcuts. I'm dominant with my right hand and I find it easy to access the semicolon on the keyboard" - Anish, Sales Rep

Use a combination of the above

We heard from some users that they will use characters as a way to categorize their shortcuts. For example, using symbols for external messages to clients, and punctuation marks to expand text.

I use the # for any customer emails, % for prospect messages, and ^ for investors. I reserve '' for any employee related matters, and ] for any common expansion like my Zoom link or Calendly invite"  Catherine, Founder