How to Save Time with Keyboard Text Replacements
avoid writing your address, certificate number, and other data each time you file

For all it’s usefulness, ForeFlight can be painful when filing flight plans. Every few days, it clears our address, certificate number, and other information.

Fortunately, there’s a easy trick to reduce friction on this and many other online forms: keyboard text replacements.

Keyboard Text Replacements

Your iPhone or Mac has a feature in the keyboard settings called Text Replacement.¹ This can be used anytime a short phrase should expand to a longer one. For example, Apple previously defaulted to expand “omw” to “On my way!”.

This post’s plausibly useful idea is to expand “@@” to your default email address. Then when you fill a form, typing @@ will automatically substitute with your email (when you press spacebar to autocomplete).

Filing Flight Plans and Other Foreflight Comments

Since we’re required to add address, certificate, and several other fields when filing flight plans, these make great candidates for text replacement. I also store convenience remarks I use frequently in student logbooks.

@@	<personal email address>
@cfi	<professional email address>
@cert	<faa certificate>
@address	<mailing address>
@ifrcom	This instrument training is intended to satisfy both 61.65(e) and 61.129(a).2
@mrr	Your landings are really coming along, you just need more right rudder through the round-out to keep holding centerline.3

---

Hope this helps save you some time and effort!
Jack

1. I am less familiar with Windows and Android, but I suspect there are similar solutions available. ↩︎
2. This allows commercial and instrument pilots to use their instrument training for both. See Oord 2018. ↩︎
3. Only joking! 😄 ↩︎