Espanso again

I’ve gone back to using Espanso for text expansion. As powerful as Keyboard Maestro is, every time I reach for it I feel like I’ve already lost a battle somewhere. Text expansion macros are about all I use KM for these days, so it’s not much of a disruption.

I bookmark Espanso’s config folder in Emacs so I can jump right in any time. The expansion macros (“matches”) are contained in YAML files and can be as simple as:

 - trigger: "j@"
    replace: "jack@baty.net

They can get pretty fancy. I don’t take full advantage of all the gizmos, but I use a ton of stuff like this:

- trigger: ":hugo"
    label: "Baty.net Hugo Post"
    vars:
      - name: mydate
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%Y-%m-%d"
      - name: mytime
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%H:%M:%S%:z"
    replace: |
             ---
             title: $|$
             date: {{mydate}}T{{mytime}}
             tags: [""]
             slug: 
             summary:
             draft: true
             ---

Espanso is developed by Federico Terzi and is free and open-source.