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Smart quotes and Mona

March 17, 2025 at 2:59 PM by Dr. Drang

One of the apps I was thinking of (but didn’t mention) when writing about smart quotes on the Mac was the Mastodon app, Mona. While the iOS version of Mona handles smart quotes as expected, the Mac version doesn’t. This was particularly annoying as I started tweeting

1 more from my Mac.

In case you’re wondering, yes, I did have the Substitutions setting in the Edit set correctly. Toggling it on and off and even restarting my Mac didn’t fix the problem. Mona kept the quotes straight no matter what.

Mona substitutions settings

Rather than complaining about Mona in that post—which was really about how Apple apps handle smart quotes differently—I sent a bug report to Mona’s developer. Never got a reply, not even the typical “we’ve received your message and will get back to you” auto-reply. Kind of annoying.

But last week I noticed there’s a beta for Mona—you can get a link to it in the “About Mona” section of its Settings—so I downloaded it and gave it a try. Boom. Smart quotes work in the beta, so that’s what I’ll be using until Version 7 is officially released. And I’m going to consider the beta to be the response to my bug report.

  1. I don’t like “toot,” and since Twitter is no longer called Twitter, I think “tweet” is fair game for us to use with any Twitter-like app. ↩

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