Readit Newsfedericoterzi commented on Espanso Cross-Platform Text Expander espanso.org/... · Posted by u/enbugger
Long time Espanso user and supporter of Federico's work. It is fantastic FOSS and it helps me get stuff done everyday. His project was the first one that I sponsored on GitHub which he recently discontinued using for donations. I have to figure out how to buy him a monthly coffee now.
Also, here is a gist of my non-work specific Espanso snippets. I share (overshare??) what I am listening to on Spotify many times a day with my friends and coworkers, so the Spotify specific one gets used a lot!
https://gist.github.com/jdoss/64c663e24cca2052842701e13db77d...
Thanks Joe, I really appreciate the kind words :)
federicoterzi commented on Espanso Cross-Platform Text Expander espanso.org/... · Posted by u/enbugger
What do people use Espanso for? I like the idea of the project but never really found a good use case for? The only thing I expand so far (using custom QMK setup on the keyboard itself) is my email.
Also, is there any package that lets you cycle between your clipboard as you type anywhere?
The Hub [1] is a good source of inspiration if you're curious :)
federicoterzi commented on Espanso Cross-Platform Text Expander espanso.org/... · Posted by u/enbugger
I'm a big fan of espanso! I use it on my MacBook, my Linux desktop, and on Windows at work. Works very well on all three. I use many plain / dumb snippets, a few forms and date-based ones, and a few shell and Powershell scripts.
I also would feel bad if I didn't mention that the main developer seems incredibly nice. I looked at this as a rust project to which I might be able to make minor contributions as a newb (which I still haven't done unfortunately). Federico goes out of his way to respond (quickly) to GH issues or posts on the subreddit in the kindest way imaginable.
Thanks for the kind words! Glad you found it useful :)
Lately I've been less responsive due to some life circumstances, but I'm slowly getting up to speed again :)
federicoterzi commented on Espanso Cross-Platform Text Expander espanso.org/... · Posted by u/enbugger
Looks like a neat idea but having any kind of keylogger installed in my machine gives me second thoughts(a keylogger has the same principle of intercepting typed words and tags but instead of replacing them according to a backend system it sends the text away or store so some other party can read)
Author here :)
This is definitely a good concern to have, though Espanso was built with security in mind, so the keys you press are not logged anywere. We keep the last N in memory (with N being usually between 5 to 30 chars) to do the matching, and discard them as soon as possible
federicoterzi commented on Espanso Cross-Platform Text Expander espanso.org/... · Posted by u/enbugger
I was wondering how this was done technically, i.e. how it gets the current text content, and how it would do the text replacement.
From a quick glance, it looks like for getting the text, it listens to all the keyboard events globally. I can imagine many potential problems and shortcomings with this approach, but on the other side, this is probably the most simple and most generic solution, working for almost every application.
For sending the text, it does sth similar, i.e. it just injects global key events. Probably first some key backspace events to delete the old text, and then the keys for the replacement text.
https://github.com/espanso/espanso/blob/dev/espanso-inject/s...
But maybe I understand the code wrong. I did not delve too deep into it.
Author here :)
You're pretty close! Espanso currently uses a combination of key injection + clipboard to get the best results. There are still some edge cases, but we are trying to solve them with other approaches, such as using custom Input Methods (the same mechanism used for some languages like Chinese)
federicoterzi commented on Espanso Cross-Platform Text Expander espanso.org/... · Posted by u/enbugger
Long time Espanso user (1+ year). It is one of those things I will lose my mind because my muscle memory is tuned to its shortcuts.
I often type the same shortcuts in my Android device out of habit. So you can tell that I'm waiting for an Android version! I'm working around it by adding words to custom dictionary in Google Keyboard. But I'd love to be able to use the same .yaml file for my phone. I'm not necessarily talking about sync as I don't change the file often.
One more thing about is the GUI search bar they have added. It has rough edges (doesn't react to my shortcut, etc.) but I'm sure it will get better.
Love Espanso! Thanks and all the best to Federico, the creator and maintainer.
Thanks for the kind words! We are working hard to improve the experience, hopefully on Android as well in the future :)
Thanks