Show HN: Espanso: detect a typed keyword and replace it while you're typing

Interesting, I built a similar system for my Vim setup that I slowly adopted over time. I realised that semicolons are almost always followed by whitespace or newlines in normal use, so I started defining a whole range of shortcuts with `;` as a prefix. As the key is directly on the homerow it's also quick and easy to use. For example I have `;out` defined to expand to the correct stdout print function depending on the programming language used…

I was wondering how this was done technically, i.e. how it gets the current text content, and how it would do the text replacement. From a quick glance, it looks like for getting the text, it listens to all the keyboard events globally. I can imagine many potential problems and shortcomings with this approach, but on the other side, this is probably the most simple and most generic solution, working for almost every application. For sending the text, it does…

This is a great app, so much so I’ve been donating for a while. I recommend anyone to try and donate if they like it!