Over the years we’ve recommendedTextExpanderandaText, but neither is exactly cheap.

The downside: it takes a little bit more work to set up.

Let’s back up a little.

The search window for the application. The three default snippets are offered.

Espanso is a free text expansion app.

To get started, download and set up the system.

ClickOpen search barand you’ve got the option to browse the current snippets.

A screenshot of the default base configuration file, which unfortunately is too long to include in alt text. It explains how the application works and provides a few demonstration replacements.

There are only a handful by default.

This doesn’t get useful until you start adding your own snippets, which is the tricky part.

I recommendreading the official documentationto really get a feelconsider the following a quick overview.

A search for beer shows a couple of emoji options.

In the “match” sub-folder you will find a file called “base.yml”.

The three snippets we saw before are all here.

you could edit them, if you like, to get a feel for how things work.

I made a few snippets by copying and pasting things to the end of the document.

Note that the number of spaces before each line is importantthings won’t work if you’re not precise.

Like I said: there is going to be some trial and error here.

I managed to built a few snippets while playing around.

By digging around in the documentation, I managed to get theform-filling pop-upworking.

If building your own snippets proves too difficult, maybe you could start with thelarge hub of pre-built collections.

you might, for example, quickly add shortcuts for every emoji, or for special characters.

Another set corrects all kinds of common mispelling.

I can’t recommendreading the documentationenough.

If not, well, there’s always the paid options.