espanso

Created: 2020-04-26 21:54:09 -0700 Modified: 2023-07-03 20:16:58 -0700

Basics (reference)

• This is for text expansions à la AutoHotkey’s hotstrings, e.g. turning “`evs” into “environment variables”.
• word matches the entire word when separators are considered. left_word matches the beginning and right_word matches the end. For example, suppose you have an expansion where '12 becomes ½, and you type 2'12.
  • With word and left_word, this doesn’t expand to anything (unless ' is a word separator for you). With right_word though, it would expand to 2½.

Quick-start guide:

• Install (Windows)
• Set an environment variable for “EDITOR” so that it doesn’t launch with Notepad
  • Open Explorer to Control PanelSystem and SecuritySystem
  • Change Settings
  • Advanced → environment variables
  • Add an “EDITOR” variable with something like C:Program FilesMicrosoft VS CodeCode.exe
• Editing the configuration:
  • espanso edit
  • Closing the editor should get the changes to “take”, but if you don’t want to close it, just run “espanso restart”.

Features I want

• Running matches using keyboard shortcuts
  • This isn’t super important since I can just use Raycast to do what I was trying to do, which is hotkey applications to ⌥1, ⌥2, etc.
• Running scripts, e.g. typing “‘ref” to write the text “(reference)” and link it to the URL on the clipboard. You can write a shell trigger that runs osascript, but espanso waits for it to finish before deleting the trigger.

Plurals

I frequently want matches like this:

- trigger: "'perm"
  replace: "permission"
  word: true
  propagate_case: true
- trigger: "'perms"
  replace: "permissions"
  word: true
  propagate_case: true

On Fri 06/30/2023, I looked into whether I could accomplish this with regex triggers, but it doesn’t seem to be possible, or at least it’s unwieldy. The closest I got was this:

- regex: "'perm(?P\<plural\>[s ])"
  replace: "permission{{plural}}"
  word: true
  propagate_case: true

• Typing 'perm and a space would work (but you would have to capture all of your delimiters in the regex)
• Typing 'perms would immediately trigger the completion rather than waiting for a space
• Even if this worked, it’s barely readable to have all of the regex gunk in each trigger. I opted to just have explicit entries for singulars/plurals.

Troubleshooting

Annoying known issues

• “word: true” woes
  • You can’t chain multiple “word: true” triggers easily (reference).
  • The internal buffer tracking whether you’ve typed triggers doesn’t know if you used ⌥Backspace to clear text (reference).