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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

Looks really cool, but isn't this literally a key logger.

I prefer this to be built in to maybe vs code, at least then I won't have to worry about accidentally capturing my passwords

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The world is a little bit bigger than VSCode. Believe it or not some of us don’t even use VSCode.

This is meant to be a replacement to AHK (which is Windows only), not a text editor snippet expander.

I usually use emmet feature (snippets) of vscode but then I also use other editors like np++, sublime or simple notepad for quick editing and lack the ability of snippets. Using a system wide textexpander makes sense. this is also the reason i dont use any chrome extension for color picking or taking screenshots. always better to use systemwide utilities.

Good point, I've wrote a short section to detail the security aspects: https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso/blob/master/SECURI...

TLDR: It's not a keylogger, because it doesn't log anything :)

Moreover, on macOS the detection mechanism is automatically disabled on password fields

Also, the biggest benefit of this approach compared to a VSCode-only snippet, is that it works on any application and also between different operating systems, which makes it easier to collaborate and reuse them :)

Thanks for the response, but unless I take the time to literally go to your entire repo and make sure you aren't doing anything weird, I'm not installing this thing.

That's absolutely ok! I'm also very open to feedback if you have any :)

If you're in a position to use this program[0], you're already taking the same risk by running most other programs on your machine - they also have access to your keypresses.

[0]: The only real reason you wouldn't be is if you're on a non-X Linux desktop. Wayland prevents this kind of program by design.

Fun fact, Wayland support is the most requested feature [1] and I think it's possible, although we will need to go deeper in the stack and exploit EVDEV

[1]: https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso/issues/287

A nice technical writeup! The daemon approach sounds particularly promising. Have you also thought about a Wayland protocol extension? espanso is not the only program that will want total keyboard access, and it's one of the last big obstacles for a lot of X11 users.

Thanks!

> Have you also thought about a Wayland protocol extension?

I honestly didn't think about that! That might be an option, perhaps when espanso becomes more well-known in the community. Before that, it's unlikely that any change I suggest will make its way into the specification :)

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