Disabling smart quotes in Mavericks
As I’ve mentioned previously, Apple does at least one thing with each new OS release that a) annoys me and b) makes me wonder about the thought process that went behind it.
In Mavericks, it’s smart quotes. These are quotes that are curved in shape and face in different directions, depending on if they’re opening quotes or closing quotes.
Having smart quotes is inconvenient for me because I can’t always tell when they’re in use until I copy and paste. If I’m copying and pasting content into a script, smart quotation marks aren’t recognized as legal quote marks, which means I have to find and replace them.
Fortunately, it’s possible to turn smart quotes off. See below the jump for details.
There’s two places I know of where you may need to turn off smart quotes:
B. TextEdit
To disable smart quotes via System Preferences:
1. Open System Preferences
2. Select the Keyboard preference pane
3. Select the Text tab in the Keyboard preferences
4. Uncheck Use smart quotes and dashes
To disable smart quotes in TextEdit
1. Launch TextEdit
2. In the TextEdit menu, select Preferences…
3. Uncheck Smart quotes and Smart dashes
4. Close the the Preferences window
5. In TextEdit’s Edit menu, select Substitutions
6. Under Substitutions, uncheck Smart Quotes and Smart Dashes
Once smart quotes have been disabled, quotes should return to being non-curly quotes marks.
Other applications may have smart quote settings, so you may need to check in the application settings.
Der Flounder 
Hi Rich, do you know where this setting is stored?
Max,
The System Preferences’ settings are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist. You can turn them on and off with defaults:
Disable smart quotes:
Disable smart dashes:
For TextEdit, these settings are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit:
Disable smart quotes:
Disable smart dashes:
That ‘Subsitutions’ menu, along with a few others, should appear when you right click on text in any application that uses the Cocoa text engine.
This is a horrible “feature”! Thank so much you for this post!
Great! At first I had only found how to turn them off in TextEdit, but they stayed on because of the system setting. Thanks for the tip.
Hello Rich,
thank you very much for documenting this. I came here while searching for ways to disable smart quotes in Automator, which drive me crazy especially when using the “Run Shell Script” action…
Alas, neither of the following settings helped in Automator:
1. Switching off “Use smart quotes and dashes” in System Preferences
2. Setting “SmartQuotes” to false for Automator via the defaults command (as for TextEdit)
3. Setting “NSAutomaticQuoteSubstitutionEnabled” to false for Automator via defaults (as for the OS)
Regardless of these settings, and across re-login and restart, every newly deployed Automator action using a Cocoa text input field has smart quotes (and the other “smarties”) enabled by default, as can be verified with the contextual menu (thanks, connectionfailure!).
I also checked if disabling via contextual menu is persistent for saved workflows, but it isn’t. I even tried to “force” smart quotes off by manually adding NSAutomaticQuoteSubstitutionEnabled entries to the document.wflow file inside the workflow bundle, but it didn’t help, either.
Would you have any other ideas – besides filing a bug with Apple?
Best regards
Rainer
You can control-click the text view in Automator to show its contextual menu which includes substitution options.
Hello Mr.K,
thanks for the hint. But I already knew this from commenter “connectionfailure” and referred to it as “disabling via contextual menu” in my comment, and as I also stated, this setting unfortunately doesn’t stick: Every time you reopen a workflow for editing, you’ll find that the “Run Shell Script” action has been reset to “Use smart quotes and dashes” enabled.
What I am looking for is a way to permanently disable smart quotes, etc. in Automator, or at least in a saved workflow, but there doesn’t seem to be a solution.
Regards, Rainer
To disable smart quotes in automator there’s a solution:
You need to Set Auto Correct to “Straight Quotes” in System Preferences/Keyboard/Text/SmartQuotes (the lowest item in the drop down) and optionally disabling Auto Correct afterwards. This permanently changes the default in automator.
Gosh, you made my day! I am learning to code and these smart quotes were driving me nuts! I was sure I was doing something wrong, but now I see what actually happened))) Thanks a lot!!! You are awesome!
Does anyone know how to turn them off in Pages? I had them off, but some came back smart after my editing sent my manuscript back with her comments and changes.
THANK YOU
To disable smart quotes in OSX El Capitan iMessage: Edit -> Substitutions -> Smart Quotes (uncheck)
Thanks, this was very helpful!
To disable smart quotes in automator there’s a solution:
You need to Set Auto Correct to “Straight Quotes” in System Preferences/Keyboard/Text/SmartQuotes (the lowest item in the drop down) and optionally disabling Auto Correct afterwards. This permanently changes the default in automator.
I was using Matthew MacDonald’s 4th edition of “Creating a Website” text and his directions nor screen shot shows this needed change. THANK YOU! After following your instructions to uncheck quotes and dashes in TextEdit, my assignment worked! Very grateful!
great work as always. Thanks again.