It was Crazy difficult to get a text expander, custom hotkeys working in Ubuntu

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I’m a tech noob and I know next to nothing about the CLI, the terminal, etc. I’ve been using Linux for about 4 years.

Today I spent about 4 hours trying to figure out how to get a custom hotkey solution working on my Ubuntu 24.04 Gnome Wayland. I looked at about 5 different apps and they were all too complicated for my noob brain. I finally stumbled upon Espanso and it was just at the edge of my Linux abilities to get it working. I finally got it working but I don’t remember all the many hoops I jumped thru to get it working.

I hope to goodness someone out there will make a noob friendly Wayland based GUI text expander custom hotkey app for Linux.

Other then headaches like these, I’m very happy to be away from Windows and hooked on Linux.

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First of all welcome to here.

I used autokey-gtk awhile ago and it worked well but I think I wasn’t using wayland at that time so I don’t know if it works nowadays.

It got the advantage that it’s in Ubuntu’s repo and there is also autokey-qt for KDE environment.

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Thanks for your reply. If I remember correctly, there were lots of complicated steps to get autokey working on Wayland. Too complicated for a noob like me. I only use Gnome, not KDE.

A number of the hotkey solutions I looked at required X11 or had very complicated work-arounds for Wayland.

I’m sending out waves of thought vibrations for someone to create a noob friendly GUI app for this need. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I struggled with this too, and used Espanso, but it is not user-friendly. In the end I just ditched Wayland completely primarily because of the shortcuts issue, but there were multiple other headaches with Wayland as well in my set up. Mythtv doesn’t play nicely with Wayland, and there were other issues that I can’t remember now. I also reverted back to Noble 24.04 as Plucky had other issues for me. I use Kubuntu which uses KDE, I like the infinite customisations that KDE offers, Gnome never really jelled with my needs, so I never used it.

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OK Linux devs, the message is loud and clear. If 2 people on this thread have the same headaches with getting shortcuts to work on Wayland that means that there are thousands of other Linux noobs and semi-noobs having the same issue.

So this issue is crying out for a solution. If I had free time I’d hop onto Claude Code and whip up a solution. I’m sure a skilled dev using Claude Code could whip up a solution very quickly. Post the solution here on this thread. Make the solution fully Wayland compatible, pure GUI and dead simple for a noob to use. Thanks!

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Many have tried to sort this out.

I just did a chatgpt session and discovered that Espanso coupled with Input-mapper can achieve this. The Espanso trigger can be any modifier, it does not have to be a colon.

The problem with the colon is it requires a shifted key which input-mapper does not recognise. I changed it to a grave on my Logitech MX Keys keyboard just below the escape key.

Now I can insert my address just with a ` and an a. My email with an ` and an e. My 'phone with a ` and a t.

Almost as good as khotkeys but working in Wayland.

So you need to download Espanso and input-mapper first. https://espanso.org/docs/install/linux/

and input-mapper here: https://github.com/sezanzeb/input-re…eadme/usage.md

Then in a terminal type espanso edit, that will give you a nano session and from there see the default example with a colon.

Create your first snippet with a grave or semi-colon or other PRIMARY key that is not used much.

Check it works.

Then follow the instructions in the gui for input mapper. It walks you through it pretty much.​

Cheers Tony

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I’m hoping that one will sort it out using Claude Code and post a link to a GUI app for this. :slightly_smiling_face:

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discovered that Espanso coupled with Input-mapper can achieve this.

Cool. Thanks for the details. I’m saving it so I can review it next time I need a hotkey expander.