Espanso For Mac

Text expanders are great tools when you need to type something repeatedly, whether it’s a word, phrase, or an entire code snippet.

Espanso has been around for a few years now, and it has recently started receiving updates again. It’s a powerful, extensible text expander, with some advanced, programmer-oriented features, and the ability to use community-created packages to add new snippets.

While the app is running, you can type a shortcut it any text field, and it will be replaced with the word, text, number, sentence, or whatever else it has been linked to. This should work in any application and text input field.

As you’ll notice, Espanso comes with very few shortcuts out of the box. To get more, you can edit the default YAML configuration file or add more, but you can also head straight to the Espanso Hub and install packages shared by other users.

When you can’t remember a particular shortcut, you can press ⌥+Space to open the search bar. Here, typing anything will filter available entries, and you can also access app commands.

If you’ve found the snippet you were looking for, just press Return to type its contents in the highlighted text field.

If the shortcut creation process wasn’t enough of a clue, this app is mostly aimed at technical users. It has shell, script, and form support, and you can get it to do just about anything if you have the know-how.

Naturally, that also means it’s not the best choice for the average user, unless they’re prepared to put in some work. You do have the option to download shortcut packages to get started, but you’ll probably end up needing to tweak those anyway.

In short, Espanso is great for programmers or other technically minded users, as it gives you endless flexibility and advanced features in an open-source package. Others might find it a bit difficult to get started, but there’s extensive documentation available for those who are up to the task.