Why do I keep losing my ‘text substitutions?’

I'm a heavy user of OS X's / iOS's ‘text substitutions’ or text replacements. I probably have hundreds of these.

At some point in the recent-ish past (last couple of years?), Apple silently started syncing them between devices logged into the same iCloud app; that was great, for a while.

Unfortunately, at some point, my Macbook lost all of my substitutions, for no apparent reason. They still existed on all my iOS devices, but now none of my completions (like ccommand or ooption or sshrug) worked on my laptop. This eventually fixed itself (again for no apparent reason) … but it's just happened again, immediately after purchasing and setting up a new Mac Pro.

As this is the second time, I'm starting to wonder if anyone else has seen this behaviour, or if they know how to go about fixing it without waiting on iCloud to Magically Fix Itself, as I did last time?

Solution 1:

After removing the folder com.apple.InputMethodKit.TextReplacementService from the depths of the ~/Library heirarchy and restarting the computers my current list of Text Replacement shortcuts is available on two Macs that previously refused to synchronize. Both of these Macs legitimately run Sierra, but didn’t start life that way. The folder com.apple.InputMethodKit.TextReplacementService is buried somewhere inside ~/Library. Sorry, I didn’t make note of the full path — I found it using a Finder Search.

Update: A friend in the Ars Technica: Macintoshian Achaia forum reports that the path is ~/Library/Group Containers/com.apple.InputMethodKit.TextReplacementService

ᔥ A VooDoo fix for Macintosh Text Replacement Sync - Jeff Berg - Mini'app'les