Featherweb Blog

2022-08-26

Espanso vs Geany snippets

I like Espanso, but I really love Geany snippets. During the last couple of weeks, I experimented with both quite intensively. Despite all the Espanso greatness, I personally decided in favor of the Geany snippets.

Here's why:

I realized I have no use for a "system-wide" expander
Espanso proved to be somewhat fragile ( in my hands at least 😄 ), needing extra care when installing, running and maintaining it.
I do not like Espanso's pop-up menu. It is an extra step and seems counter-productive in this "real-time", "as-you-type" environment.
That's why in my first version of Html utils, I tried to circumvent that pop-up by renaming tags so they no longer conflicted with one another. I had to play inventor, and it wasn't looking good: "audio" was now called "music", "bold" was called "fat" and "strike" was "--" for example.
In my second , unpublished, version of html utils,I accepted the menu window. I gathered all tags starting with an 'a' for example, gave them all the ::a trigger and that looked like a viable solution. Just scroll to the tag you need, and presto. Workable, but somewhat slow.

I am not trying to discredit Espanso. It's beautifully made, with lots of care obviously. Meanwhile, in Geany, everything is so much simpler. No conflicts between snippets, as they are only expanded after hitting the Tab key. Reliability built-in!

One of the Espanso "packages" inspired me to make a Geany version: Emoji... I made a start with some basic smiley emoji**. Very easy!

angry + Tab 😠 😠 😠 😠 😠

blush + Tab 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳

cool + Tab 😎 😎 😎 😎 😎

happy + Tab 😊 😊 😊 😊 😊

lol + Tab 😄 😄 😄 😄 😄

sml + Tab 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

sun + Tab 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞

tongue + Tab 😛 😛 😛 😛 😛

wink + Tab 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉

worry + Tab 😟 😟 😟 😟 😟

To enable these, just add the following to your Geany snippets.conf:

# Emoji
angry=<span class="">&#128544;</span>
blush=<span class="">&#128563;</span>
cool=<span class="">&#128526;</span>
happy=<span class="">&#128522;</span>
lol=<span class="">&#128516;</span>
sml=<span class="">&#128512;</span>
sun=<span class="">&#127774;</span>
tongue=<span class="">&#128539;</span>
wink=<span class="">&#128521;</span>
worry=<span class="">&#128543;</span>

When small is not so beautiful

If you're like me, squinting your eyes trying to see what emoji you're looking at, this solves it: just add a class* to give the emoji a size. I used the simple clothing convention:

M = 120% font-size
L = 150% font-size
XL = 300% font-size
XXL= 500% font-size

To achieve this, add the following to your CSS file:

/* for Emoji*/
.M { font-size:120%; }
.L {font-size:150%; }
.XL { font-size:300%; }
.XXL { font-size:500%; }

Not only for emoji 😄

* classless...: hm, not easy, more of a worthwhile intention, allowing some classes when needed.

** To me, these emoji look good and colorful in Firefox, not so nice in webkit-based browsers. On the other hand, the monochrome emoji in webkit-based browsers are easier to read in the default font-size and have less need of being magnified. Unless the goal is fun, of course...
In case your browser shows a rectangle as the opening image of this post, it should have looked like this image (the sun emoji at 30rem):