I never had the time to deal with my Espanso1 hijinks until today.
While it worked perfectly, when I installed it all those years ago, when I migrated over from the Mac, Espanso itself has changed and evolved over the years.
It took over my old configuration like a champ and mostly worked, with the exception of a few shortcuts; ones that I frequently used 😂

Emacs was one application of mine that never quite worked right with Espanso.
I’d frequently get timed out waiting for reply from selection owner whenever I tried expansions in there. Typing :joy to get 😂 would work in every other program, but no joy with Emacs, in additon to plenty of other expansions err … not expanding.

All my browser url expansions would not expand properly either, with mangled expansions most of the time.

So today I dove in to the docs, and realised two things.
1. My emacs needed a longer time out
2. Espanso now tries to identify the kind of text, and maybe those were causing my issues?


Emacs

I realised I needed a longer clipboard threshold, only for Emacs.
So I created an App specific configuration, just for Emacs to use and gave it said option. Here’s what the contents of my espanso/config/emacs.yml look like

filter_class: 'Emacs'
clipboard_threshold: 10000

Rich Text Expansions

That helped with a lot of expansions in Emacs, but not with my joy expansion.
And not with stuff that were links and oh … links! and html! and markdown! Could those be the culprits?2
The docs mention that Espanso now has rich text support
What that means, is that the trigger nows supports two new keywords html and markdown in addition ye ole replace So I changed most of my affected shortcuts to either of those two keywords; markdown for most everything and html for linky stuff. Here’s what my beloved joy looks like now …

matches:
  - trigger: ":joy"
    markdown: 😂


And those two things did it! Every shortcut expands everwhere! What joy 😂


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  1. Espanso lets you assign short snippets of text to longer streams of text, that you’d frequently use. I use :adhx for example, and it expands out to type my whole address. Pretty handy! ↩︎

  2. dun! dun! dun! they were! ↩︎