Nat Taylor — Blog, AI, Product Management & Tinkering

Espanso Text Expander

Published on Nov 27, 2022.

I thrive of taking shortcuts, so expanding text is Espanso brings me great joy. I type :l7d and it gets replaced with dateadd(day, -7, current_date) and I think that’s awesome. Get started with:

1. brew tap espanso/espanso
2. brew install espanso
3. xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Applications/Espanso.app (Otherwise MacOS will prevent you from opening the app due to faulty code signing)
4. Add a trigger to code /Users/ntaylor/Library/Application Support/espanso/match/base.yml (example below)

That’s it — you’re ready to expand!

- trigger: ":l7d"
  replace: "dateadd(day, -7, current_date)"Code language: Python (python)