Use This Free App to Create Custom Text Shortcuts
Text expansion tools are essential for anyone who constantly copies and pastes the same information multiple times a day. We’ve recommended TextExpander and aText over the years, but neither of them are cheap. If you’re looking for a free alternative and don’t mind messing around with configuration files, you should try Espanso .
It’s a free, open-source app for Windows, Mac, and Linux that can do almost everything paid apps can do, for free. Disadvantage: Requires a little more work to set up.
Let’s go back a little. Text expansion tools allow you to define trigger words that you can enter in any app to quickly insert something longer. For example, I could set up such an application to replace “:jhp” with ” Justin Pot ” along with a link to make it a little faster to explain who I am in a professional email. The best apps allow you to do this, and also offer automation for things like including the current date or even information from other programs.
Espanso is a free text expansion app. To get started, download and install the application. Windows and Mac users will find a system icon, but Linux users will have to rely entirely on the command line, which I’m sure won’t be a problem for them.
Click Open Search Bar and you can view your current snippets. By default there are only a few.
It won’t do any good until you start adding your own pieces, which is the hardest part. I recommend reading the official documentation to get the full picture – consider the following short overview.
You can add snippets manually by editing the configuration file located at C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\espanso on Windows (replace “user” with your actual username) and ~/Library/Application Support/espanso on macOS. In the “match” subfolder you will find the “base.yml” file. Open this in any text editor to see examples of adding your own snippets.
All three fragments that we saw earlier are here. You can edit them if you want to understand how things work. I made a few snippets by copying and pasting them at the end of the document. Espanso will reload the configuration file every time you save it and tell you if anything is broken. Please note that the number of spaces before each line is important – nothing will work if you are not precise.
As I said: there will be trial and error. During the game I was able to create several fragments. After digging through the documentation, I was able to get the form popup to work.
If creating your own snippets proves too difficult, perhaps you can start with the larger Pre-made Collections hub . For example, you can quickly add shortcuts for each emoji or for special characters. Another set corrects all kinds of common spelling errors. This is a great way to understand what the app can do and even open files to see how they work.
Ultimately, however, this is an application that you will have to work at to get the most out of it. I can’t recommend reading the documentation enough. It may be a little confusing, but you are smart – I know you can figure it out. If not, there are always paid options.