When it comes to time-saving tools, the text expander is one of the most universally W useful. Everyone has to type words, phrases and sentences, but smart text expander tools such as Espanso do more than simply enable you to save time entering repetitive information – you can also use it as a universal autocorrect tool, or to quickly populate an email with a specific template, insert system information such as your IP address or even quickly embed bits of code with the minimum of fuss.
Get set up
Espanso comes in two flavours depending on whether you’re running the X11 or Wayland desktop environment. Wayland support is currently described as “experimental”, which means several Espanso features are missing – the most crucial one is appspecific configurations (see https://espanso.org/docs/ configuration/app-specific-configurations/ for details).
As a rule of thumb, anyone running Ubuntu 21.04 or later is running Wayland, but you can confirm this by opening Settings, selecting About and seeing what’s listed under Windowing System – you can opt to log into a X11 session. Now head over to https://espanso. org/docs/install/linux/ to locate instructions for obtaining Espanso either as a DEB package (recommended for Ubuntu and Debian) or AppImage – make sure you choose the right version for X11 or Wayland. The following instructions apply exclusively to Debian and Ubuntu users running Wayland. First, download the DEB installer: $ wget https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso/
