Espanso Triggers

Espanso lacks a menu with all user defined triggers. Espanso Triggers is a tiny companion script to list all user defined triggers in the Mac OS X menu bar. Platypus is used to create a menulet from the bash script.

Features

• replaces the Espanso menulet
• pause and restart the Espanso service from the menu
• the Espanso YAML file can be edited from the menu
• triggers can be selected and started directly from the menu
• supports multiple YAML trigger files
• lists all user defined triggers
• optional comments to a trigger
• lists installed Espanso Packages in sub-menus
• each sub-menu is labeled with a small Espanso 'e' and the package name

Espanso Triggers Menu with one or multiple yml files

Espanso Triggers Menu with package sub menu

Download and install

Download the latest version of EspansoTriggers.zip from Releases. Unzip the file and place it somewhere in your Applications folder.

How to use

Double click the Espanso Triggers app and a small Espanso 'e' is added to the menu bar. Click on the 'e' to see a list of all of your triggers. If you want to start Espanso Triggers on every boot, add it to your login items (Apple menu > System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items)

How to remove the now superfluous old Espanso 'e'

The standard Espanso menulet is no longer needed as all functions are included in Espanso Triggers. If you want to hide the original menulet select "Edit triggers…" and the default YAML file is opened. Add show_icon: false at the top of the file and save the changes. After restarting Espanso (select the Pause Espanso menu item and afterwards the Restart Espanso menu item) only the Espanso Triggers 'e' will be displayed.

Multiple trigger files

When there are more than one YAML trigger file in the Espanso directory Preferences/espanso the triggers will be listed in groups with the filename as group name e.g work.yml becomes

How to add comments to triggers

To help you to memorize your different triggers a short comment can be added right after the trigger

trigger: "+hphone" # private

trigger: "+bphone" # business

How to use your own text editor

Edit triggers… opens the file ‘default.yml‘ in the standard text editor.

To use your own editor change the open -e command in line #15 of Espanso Triggers.app/Contents/Resources/script to ‘open -a "YourEditor" -e $HOME/Library/Preferences/espanso/default.yml‘.

e.g. if you want to use Visual Studio Code open -a "Visual Studio Code" -e $HOME/Library/Preferences/espanso/default.yml

History

2021-04-22 Initial Release

2021-05-05 NEW group triggers by file, FIX remove empty line from package sub menu

Disclaimer

The menulet is provided as is. It is tested under OS X 10.13 High Siera Espanso and Playtypus are open source software, you can make a donation to the developers on their websites.

Reference

Espanso by Federico Terzi is an open-source cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux) text expander

Platypus by Sveinbjorn Thordarson creates native Mac applications from command line scripts such as shell scripts or Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, JavaScript and PHP programs.