Recognition over recall
Put the options on screen instead of making people remember them. Picking from a list beats typing from memory.
See it
What it is
Recognizing something you see is cheap; retrieving it from memory is expensive. So put the options in front of people instead of asking them to produce the right answer from nothing. It is heuristic six of Nielsen's ten, and it is why autocomplete, recently-used lists, thumbnails, and visible menu labels exist.
Reach for it anywhere a blank field expects a value the user has already seen somewhere else: a file name, a project, a country code, a command, a color they picked last week. The move is usually one of three: show a list, show recents, or show an example of the expected value inline instead of in a help doc you hope they read.
Gotcha: recognition is not free, it costs screen space and attention, and dumping 40 visible options is its own kind of cruelty. The good pattern teaches both at once. A menu item that displays its keyboard shortcut next to it gives beginners recognition today and experts recall tomorrow.
Ask AI for it
Redesign this input so it relies on recognition instead of recall. Replace the free-text field with a searchable list of real options, surface the user's 3 most recent choices above the list, and show the expected format as an inline example rather than in a tooltip. Keep typing supported for power users: allow free typing that filters the list, and display each option's keyboard shortcut next to its label.