Interesting, I built a similar system for my Vim setup that I
slowly adopted over time. I realised that semicolons are almost
always followed by whitespace or newlines in normal use, so I
started defining a whole range of shortcuts with `;` as a
prefix. As the key is directly on the homerow it's also quick
and easy to use.
For example I have `;out` defined to expand to the correct
stdout print function depending on the programming language used
in that file.
Espanso looks like it's a great way to expand the same concept
to the whole system, albeit (I'm guessing) without the
contextual info a text editor can provide.
> Espanso looks like it's a great way to expand the same concept to the whole system, albeit (I'm guessing) without the contextual info a text editor can provide.
That's right, out of the box espanso does not have any access to the contextual information, but with some "script gymnastics" [1] you can do plenty of interesting things :)
I've been using Espanso for about a month and it's made some tasks in my daily life so much easier. I regularly have to use template text, and instead of having to copy-paste it every time I've just set it to a snippet and it ends up saving me quite a lot of time. I've also taken to using it for URLs, as in some repsects its easier than having something bookmarked.
Definitely one of those tools that make me wonder how I got by without it
Bit of a plug, but if you crave for that, and more, you can use AutoKey on Linux (not AutoHotKey which is Windows only): https://github.com/autokey/autokey
It will let you bind custom Python scripts to any mouse/keyboard sequence, including words on the fly. It can trigger word replacements just like Espanso (I use it to fill in emails, dates, addresses, timestamps et phone numbers), and of course, Python being Python, it lets you do a lot more.
The UI is probably not as good as Espanso's, and it may be harder to use (you need to script). On the other hand, it provides an API for prompting you with UI to select dates, files, input, etc., has timers and the whole Python 3 stdlib.
Some nice stuff I do with it:
- typing $email/$ phone present me with a list of email addresses/phone num (I have a lot of them) to insert one. Prevents typo. By pass web form limitations.
- $now and $date does something similar with dates (listing of various formats for the current date and a calendar). Very handy for documents and file name. Most of them don't have automated fields set up.
- $paste paste the clip board content, by passing any UI preventing me to do so, and screen/tmux limitations.
- I'm a heavy dynalist users (dynalist.io/) I love this software, but it lacks a lot of features, which are easy to add with AutoKey: just make a macro that inputs a serie of actions.
Hey,
AutoKey is awesome indeed! I've used it myself for a while before developing espanso. In fact, I went through the code-base multiple times to understand how it could be so fast. I learned plenty of things about how the X server works thanks to you :)
You're welcome! Espanso on Linux wouldn't be possible without other open-source projects, so that's the least I can do to give something back to the community :)
> Do you plan to add scripting capabilities to Espanso or do you prefer to focus on the current use case ?
We might add a "macro" feature to add delays and combine multiple keypresses, but I don't see espanso becoming a general "automation" tool. There are already plenty of great options for that (including AutoKey)!
I have a simple custom solution that works well for me. Snippets are just files in a directory. The filename is the snippet name. If the file is executable, it uses whatever is returned from running it. You can use zenity [0] to create forms or run rofi/dmenu to select "arguments" in those scripts.
It uses `rofi` and `xdotool`:
#!/bin/bash
SNIPPET_DIR="${HOME}/.config/snipex"
DMENU="rofi -dmenu -b -p Snippet:"
XSEL="/usr/bin/xsel --clipboard --input"
SNIPPET=$(ls -1 "${SNIPPET_DIR}" | ${DMENU})
FILE="${SNIPPET_DIR}/${SNIPPET}"
STRIP_NEWLINE="head -c -1"
if [ -x "${FILE}" ]; then
# snippet is executable -> run it and copy the result
${FILE} | ${STRIP_NEWLINE} | ${XSEL}
elif [ -f "${FILE}" ]; then
# copy the contents of the file
${STRIP_NEWLINE} ${FILE} | ${XSEL}
else
# clean clipboard
echo "" | ${XSEL}
fi
xdotool key --clearmodifiers "Shift+Insert"
edit: and I have an xbindkeys config to run this script when I press Meta+,
I used Espanso a while back on my Win 10 machine. It was nice, but I got noticeable lag compared to the smooth replacing of AutoHotKey (AHK also uses less resources).
I might switch to Espanso in the future though, given that AHK is not available on Linux.
I'm sorry you experienced this problem! How many snippets were you using?
AHK is indeed a wonderful tool, and because it only supports Windows, it can apply some optimizations that are not available on other platforms.
I'm currently rewriting the core, so things might get a bit faster in the future :)
I seem to have found a bug. When I use the default match ":espanso" on my terminal (Kitty) it gets expanded to "hi there1", while I expect "Hi there!". Seems to work fine on Firefox.
Edit: Seems like it's an issue with shifted characters? When I type any trigger and erase, for example ":espanso", I expect the first character to be a colon (:) but instead I get a semi-colon (;). Weird.
Thanks!
I'm currently working on a way to make this possible, but for now you will have to stick with forms :) (or passive mode [1], but I'd advice against that as it's going away in the next version).
It's very nice that this is done with Rust, because I'd love to get rid of AutoHotkey in Windows (which also trivally support this kind of expansions). Do you plan to release individual components as crates?
I don't see myself using single program to do just expansions, but instead building my own program with Rust that has all sort of shortcuts like in AutoHotkey. I could use your expansion code as crate instead.
Hey,
It's unlikely that espanso will become a library anytime soon, but I'm currently refactoring the core into separate crates to follow a more modular "workspace" approach. So if you want to write your own standalone program, you could just pick the modules you need!
Thanks! First things that come to my mind:
1. Espanso is free and open-source
2. If you use espanso and then move to Linux or Windows, the transition is flawless
3. It support Forms [1] and it can be extended in many ways [2]
4. You can easily collaborate with others and share snippets on the Hub: https://hub.espanso.org/
Cons:
There is no GUI yet, but we are working on it
One more question if you're up for it: does Espanso suffer from having secure input disabled?
I frequently see this with both aText and Alfred: "Secure input is enabled (by loginwindow)" (aText) & "loginwindow seems to be preventing text expansion by locking secure entry" (Alfred)... with no indication as to how to rectify the situation.
Ah nevermind, I see this when I run `espanso start`:
"WARNING: An application is currently using SecureInput and might prevent espanso from working correctly."
For anyone else who ends up here with the same problem: this blog post was helpful as it suggested that locking & unlocking my system might remove the lock on secureinput created by loginwindow: https://rakhesh.com/mac/macos-find-app-using-secure-input/
Thanks! your best bet is to activate notification on the issue I linked before :)
I'm currently working on it, the detection part is almost done, I'll need to figure out the best way to inject the text after detecting a match
I used to use TextExpander, but their app started to feel unpolished and was a bit expensive for my tastes. I've been using Espanso now for the most of the last year and I've been enjoying it. I even made a video about it [0].
My favorite "feature" is the fact that it works so easily cross-platform.
As someone with quite a few AHK hotstrings, and who does almost all of their day-to-day in Windows, what's the selling point for this software vs AHK? Looks like a great and useful piece of software, but is there a reason to prefer this in cases where AHK is viable?
This is really cool. I just made a keyboard shortcut tool and I wish I had known about this.
Basically, I brought some Windows keyboard shortcuts to linux. Specifically, Alt + 0,N,N,N to type accented characters. For example, è is Alt + 0,2,3,2.
Autokey was too slow, I ended up using a hacky OS keyboard shortcut + bash script approach. Ugly but it works! I should see if I can use espanso for this.
when it says: Works with almost any program - what programs is it not working with, and are they OS specific? From what I know of text expansion on Windows I would expect every program on Windows works and it is Mac and Linux that gives the problems?
As long as the program accepts keyboard input or clipboard pasting, espanso should work correctly.
There are some programs that behave a little bit differently (such as Thunderbird on Linux), that require a couple of configuration changes to work as expected (for example, slowing down the injections if the program is slow to process input).
Given the... average quality of software in 2021, I'm not sure you'd rather have intermittent crashes and freezes instead, because multithreading is notoriously tricky to get right --- and I'm saying this as someone who has worked in software for several decades.
Thanks! It's the first time I get to see Clavier so I'm not very prepared, but some differences could be:
1. Espanso is cross-platform, so you create your config once and then run it on all your machines
2. Clavier comes with a GUI, but espanso does not (yet)
3. Espanso is highly flexible thanks to scripts [1] and forms [2]
Thanks! Actually, there is AutoKey for linux and it works pretty well, though I personally started espanso because I often use different operating systems, and none of the existing tools was cross-platform :)
I usually use emmet feature (snippets) of vscode but then I also use other editors like np++, sublime or simple notepad for quick editing and lack the ability of snippets. Using a system wide textexpander makes sense. this is also the reason i dont use any chrome extension for color picking or taking screenshots. always better to use systemwide utilities.
Also, the biggest benefit of this approach compared to a VSCode-only snippet, is that it works on any application and also between different operating systems, which makes it easier to collaborate and reuse them :)
Thanks for the response, but unless I take the time to literally go to your entire repo and make sure you aren't doing anything weird, I'm not installing this thing.
If you're in a position to use this program[0], you're already taking the same risk by running most other programs on your machine - they also have access to your keypresses.
[0]: The only real reason you wouldn't be is if you're on a non-X Linux desktop. Wayland prevents this kind of program by design.
Fun fact, Wayland support is the most requested feature [1] and I think it's possible, although we will need to go deeper in the stack and exploit EVDEV
A nice technical writeup! The daemon approach sounds particularly promising. Have you also thought about a Wayland protocol extension? espanso is not the only program that will want total keyboard access, and it's one of the last big obstacles for a lot of X11 users.
> Have you also thought about a Wayland protocol extension?
I honestly didn't think about that! That might be an option, perhaps when espanso becomes more well-known in the community. Before that, it's unlikely that any change I suggest will make its way into the specification :)
For example I have `;out` defined to expand to the correct stdout print function depending on the programming language used in that file.
Espanso looks like it's a great way to expand the same concept to the whole system, albeit (I'm guessing) without the contextual info a text editor can provide.