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Comment by tnorthcutt | Hacker News Reader

Espanso looks pretty cool! I’m curious if you can share compelling reasons to switch from e.g. Alfred’s snippets functionality (on macOS)?

I’ve used aText for a long time, then semi-recently moved most things to Alfred, but I’m curious about Espanso :)

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Thanks! First things that come to my mind: 1. Espanso is free and open-source 2. If you use espanso and then move to Linux or Windows, the transition is flawless 3. It support Forms [1] and it can be extended in many ways [2] 4. You can easily collaborate with others and share snippets on the Hub: https://hub.espanso.org/

Cons: There is no GUI yet, but we are working on it

[1]: https://espanso.org/docs/forms/ [2]: https://espanso.org/docs/matches/

Thanks for the replies!

One more question if you're up for it: does Espanso suffer from having secure input disabled?

I frequently see this with both aText and Alfred: "Secure input is enabled (by loginwindow)" (aText) & "loginwindow seems to be preventing text expansion by locking secure entry" (Alfred)... with no indication as to how to rectify the situation.

Ah nevermind, I see this when I run `espanso start`:

"WARNING: An application is currently using SecureInput and might prevent espanso from working correctly."

For anyone else who ends up here with the same problem: this blog post was helpful as it suggested that locking & unlocking my system might remove the lock on secureinput created by loginwindow: https://rakhesh.com/mac/macos-find-app-using-secure-input/

Yes, unfortunately there is not much we can do about that, given that macOS does not give us much information :)

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