“Replace ‘:poke’ with ‘Pokémon,’ or save some time by replacing ‘:greeting’ with a stock email template. That’s the basic idea, but Espanso goes much further. It’s one of the most powerful utilities I’ve used, and if you’re willing to do a bit of legwork to set it up properly, it can be one of the most powerful tools on your PC, too”, writes Jacob Roach.
Installing Espanso for Wayland
Espanso is a cross-platform text expander written in Rust. It “detects when you type a keyword and replaces it while you’re typing“. Follow these instructions to install Espanso 2.3.0 for Wayland on your Debian system.
Step 1
Install the required packages from the Debian repository.
$ sudo apt-get install --yes libwxgtk3.2-1t64 wl-clipboard
Step 2
Download Espanso v2.3.0.
$ wget -P "$HOME/Downloads/" --show-progress https://github.com/espanso/espanso/releases/download/v2.3.0/espanso-debian-wayland-amd64.deb
Step 3
Install the downloaded package on your local system.
$ sudo dpkg -i "$HOME/Downloads/espanso-debian-wayland-amd64.deb"
Step 4
Give espanso the permissions required for its operation.
$ sudo setcap "cap_dac_override+p" $(which espanso)
Check to see if the espanso binary was installed successfuly.
$ espanso --version
Step 5
Register espanso as a systemd service.
$ espanso service register
Step 6
Launch espanso as a service.
$ espanso start && espanso status
Use the wizard to get started.
Step 7
After completing the wizard, use [Alt + Space] to open the search bar.
GNOME desktop only
Use the following command to change the conflicting default shortcut for opening the search bar.
$ sed -i 's/search_shortcut: ALT+SPACE/search_shortcut: ALT+SHIFT+SPACE/' "$HOME/.config/espanso/config/default.yml"
Use [Alt + Shift + Space] to open the search bar.
Experimental support for Wayland
Espanso has some known limitations under Wayland. Most notably, “there is currently no support for App-specific configurations”.