The Double-Space Shortcut
Apple brought one of the most popular iOS smartphone features over to macOS: the double-space period shortcut. On an iPhone, tapping the spacebar twice at the end of a sentence automatically inserts a period followed by a single space, allowing you to quickly start the next sentence without reaching for the punctuation keys. When applied to a physical Mac keyboard, however, this feature can be incredibly annoying. If you are a fast typist, a coder, or someone who frequently uses the spacebar for formatting or aligning text, you might accidentally trigger the double-space macro. Suddenly, your carefully formatted code or document is littered with unwanted periods, breaking syntax and requiring tedious corrections.
How to Disable the Period Shortcut
This smartphone-centric typing macro can be disabled deep within the macOS Keyboard settings, restoring standard, predictable behavior to your physical spacebar.
1. Click the Apple logo () in the top-left corner of your screen.
2. Select System Settings (or System Preferences on older versions of macOS).
3. Scroll down the left-hand navigation sidebar and click on Keyboard.
4. In the main Keyboard settings pane, look for the section labelled “Text Input.”
5. Click the Edit button next to “Input Sources.”
6. A new dialog box will appear. Look at the list of toggles in the main area of this box.
7. Find the option labelled Add period with double-space.
8. Click the toggle switch next to it to turn it Off (the switch will turn gray).
9. Click Done to save your changes and close the dialog box.
The change is instantaneous. You can now open a text editor and rapidly mash the spacebar as fast as you want; macOS will only output blank spaces, exactly as a traditional keyboard should.
Checking Application-Specific Settings
If you disabled the system-wide setting but are still seeing automatic periods in a specific application like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you need to check that app’s internal AutoCorrect settings.
For example, in Word, go to Tools > AutoCorrect and ensure there isn’t a custom rule replacing two spaces with a period. The macOS system toggle controls the operating system, but heavy word processors sometimes run their own independent text replacement engines.