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Comment by cornstalks | Hacker News Reader

The "Math Notes" thing is absolutely infuriating to me. I use TextEdit on macOS for various notes and the forced math autocomplete (with no way to turn it off) has pushed me away from TextEdit entirely.

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Forced AI garbage seems to be Notes team's SOP at this point. They destroyed the handwriting experience on iPads, in iOS 18, with an incompetent spellchecker that can't be turned off. At least this math thing is somewhat unobtrusive, the spellchecker straight-up destroys notes. No acknowledgement of radars and no fix in sight, as expected of Apple I suppose.

Anecdotally even palm rejection seems to have gone to absolute shit in Notes with iOS 18. When I go to write now there’s like a 50% chance the scroll position flies up the document.

I also tried their “handwriting improvement” feature that claims to clean up lines a bit while still looking like your own writing. All it did was turn legible writing into total gibberish.

Do you mean Notes? TextEdit doesn't support this functionality at all.

I mean TextEdit. It definitely supports this to some degree, at least. Try typing “4 * 2 =” on a new line.

Heck even Safari on my phone autofilled “8” when typing this comment.

Ah - you can turn this off with keyboard - text input - input sources - edit - show inline predictive text

Sweet mercy I don't know how I didn't find that or how to thank you enough!

Wait actually that doesn't work. TextEdit still autocompletes the friggin' math.

This smelled like one of those things where they've applied a certain behavior to an entire class of widget for consistency's sake, and TextEdit just happens to use that widget. If so, it'd be controlled at the system settings level.

Sure enough: System Settings -> Keyboard -> (under the "text input" area) Edit... (button next to your primary keyboard language) -> toggle "Show Inline Predictive Text"

If you want to easily switch between having it and not, I bet you can set a second keyboard with the same language but a different setting there and use the quick keyboard switcher widget/shortcuts (I did not try this, though). Or there's probably a way to shortcut it with AppleScript or some other automation thingy with ten minutes of effort (mostly googling).

But that still doesn't disable it. I can type in "cos(23 deg) =" and it will autocomplete it, even though I have "Show inline predictive text" disabled. I can post a screencast if anyone would like.

Weird, I tried "1+1=" before and after and it disabled it for me.

[EDIT] A quirk: I do have to hit "done" on the window before it seems to apply the change, toggling doesn't do it until I hit "done" (I just tried again to double-check and noticed this)

[EDIT 2] Nb I don't not-believe you, we could be on different OS versions (I'm on 15.1) or something else could be causing the difference.

I'm on macOS 15.2.

Currently it's not autocompleting some simple algebra. But if I enter more "complex" equations ("3 / 4 =", "3 * 5 - 2 - 1 =", "tan(pi) =", etc.) then it autocompletes those. I can't figure out why it's inconsistent. And I've definitely checked and confirmed "Show inline predictive text" is disabled and I've rebooted to try and give everything a fresh start.

One thing I've noticed is that if I enter the same equation multiple times it might stop suggesting for that specific equation, so I suggest trying multiple different equations.

Oh god, that's deeply weird.

I've felt for some time they're overdue for an "almost nothing but bug fixes and performance improvements" major release like we got a couple times in the 20-teens :-/

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