Espanso shortcuts

I've used TextExpander since 2008(!!) and have loved it. I use it for everything, like little shortcuts for typographic things like

• ;comm for ⌘, ;shift for ⇧, ;opt for ⌥
• ;times for a true multiplication sign ×, ;minus for a true subtraction sign −
• ;prime1 and ;prime2 for ′ and ″ (like 5′ 11″)

…and date things like:

• ;dt for "2025-03-22"
• ;dz for "2025-03-22T12:09"
• ;date for "March 22, 2025"

…and longer words with repeated letters that I always mess up, like these:

• insttn for "institution"
• consttal for "constitutional"
• entrepal for "entrepreneurial"

…and code snippets like ;dplyrsum for inserting this R code to disable {dplyr}'s grouping messages:

options(dplyr.summarise.inform = FALSE)

…and longer pre-written templates for emails and code.

It's a delightful piece of software and I type and navigate far slower on computers without it. It's $40/year, and I've happily paid for it for years, but I've always been on the lookout for an open source alternative.

And I found one: Espanso! It can do everything TextExpander can, and more (like multiple triggers for the same shortcut, one trigger for multiple shortcuts, regular expression-based triggers, etc.)

Espanso is configured with YAML, so I exported all my shortcut groups from TextExpander, reworked/reformatted them to YAML entries with VS Code, and now everything is working perfectly for free.

Because I'm a huge believer in sharing everything, I've included all my match settings (triggers, replacements, forms, etc.) in this repository in the match directory. Each YAML file there corresponds to one of my old TextExpander groups.