Espanso: Type Two Characters, Auto-Complete an Entire Paragraph

One-sentence solution: Tired of typing the same address, email, or reply template every day? Espanso lets you type two letters to auto-complete an entire paragraph.

Think about how many times you repeatedly type the same things every day: email addresses, company names, home addresses, greetings, common code snippets… A paragraph of text you have to retype every single time.

Espanso lets you use shortcuts to replace these repetitive inputs.

What is Espanso?

Espanso is an open-source, cross-platform text expansion tool. You pre-configure some “shortcut → full text” matching rules, and then in any application, typing the shortcut automatically replaces it with the corresponding full content.

The problem it solves: eliminate repetitive typing and boost typing efficiency.

Real-World Effect

Once you’ve set up your rules:

• Type :addr → automatically becomes your home address
• Type :email → automatically becomes your email
• Type :sig → automatically becomes your signature (name + title + phone + email)
• Type :date → automatically becomes today’s date

It works everywhere you can type — email, WeChat, Word, browsers…

Difference from AutoHotkey

Aspect	Espanso	AutoHotkey
Primary use case	Text expansion	Full automation
Configuration difficulty	Simple (YAML)	Complex (scripting language)
Cross-platform	✅ Mac/Win/Linux	❌ Windows only
Learning curve	Low	High

Espanso is deeply optimized specifically for “text expansion” — much simpler than AutoHotkey.

Download

• Official site: https://espanso.org/
• GitHub Releases: https://github.com/espanso/espanso/releases

Tip: Remember to configure auto-start after installation so it’s always active.

Quick Start

1. Download and install Espanso
2. Open the config directory (right-click the taskbar icon or run espanso edit in the terminal)
3. Add rules in match.yml:

   matches:
     - trigger: ":addr"
       replace: "123 Main Street, New York, NY 10001"
     - trigger: ":email"
       replace: "yourname@example.com"

4. Save the file — Espanso automatically reloads the config
5. Try it in any input field, type :addr followed by a space

Advanced Usage

• Supports date variables (auto-expands to today’s date)
• Supports Shell command expansion
• Supports image pasting
• Supports multi-line text