I’m a big fan of text expanders, espanso being my favorite one. As Xorg is no longer maintained, I recently switched to Wayland and the Gnome desktop environment.
Unfortunately, I found out that Wayland support is experimental. This means espanso has to be installed from source. I browsed some forums and saw that installing espanso on Wayland is tricky.
After some tinkering, I managed to get espanso running on my system:
- Void Linux x86_64 6.12.30_1
- Gnome 47.4 on Wayland
Install rustup
Install rust via rustup.
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
Verify the installation:
rustc --version
Install other dependencies
Compiling espanso requires wxWidgets:
sudo xbps-install -S wxWidgets-gtk3-devel
Build espanso
Next I followed the espanso install from source guide.
git clone https://github.com/espanso/espanso
cd espanso
cargo make --profile release --env NO_X11=true build-binary
The guide recommends cargo-make version 0.34.0, but this caused my installation to fail.
Upgrading to cargo-make 0.37.24 solved the issue:
cargo install --force cargo-make
Now retry the installation:
cargo make --profile release --env NO_X11=true build-binary
Complete successfully.
Crashing on startup
Alas, starting espanso with espanso service start --unmanaged1 caused it to crash right after startup:
$ espanso service start --unmanaged
espanso started correctly!
$ espanso status
espanso is not running
Taking a look at logs with espanso log shows that we need to install wl-clipboard:
22:08:21 [worker(17213)] [ERROR] unable to call 'wl-paste' binary, please install the wl-clipboard package.
22:08:21 [worker(17213)] [ERROR] thread 'engine thread' panicked at 'failed to initialize clipboard module: wl-clipboard binaries are missing': espanso/src/cli/worker/engine/mod.rs:193
Install it:
sudo xbps-install wl-clipboard
Now we can launch espanso successfully.
Autostart
Running espanso in unmanaged mode means espanso does not rely on the system service manager to run, but as a result, we are in charge of starting/stopping espansowhen needed.
Running espanso on startup can be achieved by creating an autostart file:
cat > ~/.config/autostart/espanso.desktop << 'EOF'
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Espanso
Comment=Text Expander
Exec=espanso start --unmanaged
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;
StartupNotify=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
EOF
Don’t forget to add the CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE capability to the binary’s set of Permitted ones2:
sudo setcap "cap_dac_override+p" $(which espanso)
That’s it! You can now enjoy espanso on Wayland.