It is my immense pleasure to announce that Snippet Expander v1.0.1 has been released!

https://snippetexpander.org

What Is Snippet Expander?

Snippet Expander is "Your little expandable text snippets helper", for Linux. With Snippet Expander you can type a saved abbreviation and it will automatically expand to the associated body text.

Placeholders

Your snippets can optionally include placeholders for formatted and calculated dates and times, the clipboard contents, other snippets, and cursor position.

Placeholders Manual Page

Search & Paste Window

There is also a very handy search and paste window for if you can't remember your abbreviation, or happen to be using an application that does not allow auto expansion of snippets. Personally, I pretty much always use the search and paste window, and find holding down the shift key when I select a snippet a great way to have the snippet body pasted into a terminal window when the search and paste window closes.

The most recently used snippets are shown first in the search and past window, with numeric quick select keys for the first 10 items. So opening the search and paste window via a shortcut, typing a couple of letters to search your snippets, and selecting the right one can be super quick.

Snippet Expander's desktop application will try and set up a shortcut for the search and past window when first run, but if it can't, you can set up the shortcut using your system's settings. Just call the application with the –search-and-paste option:

snippetexpandergui --search-and-paste

Options in GUI's Manual Page

CLI

There is also a fully featured command line interface that can be used to manage snippets and settings.

CLI Manual Page

What Happened to Snippet Pixie?

Snippet Expander is a complete rewrite of Snippet Pixie using (mostly) different languages, with a more flexible architecture, giving improved speed, stability and utility.

Snippet Pixie is now considered deprecated, and is no longer being worked on as Snippet Expander supersedes it.

You can export your snippets from Snippet Pixie and import them into Snippet Expander.

Where Can You Get It?

Snippet Expander isn't packaged for any Linux distro just yet, although I have submitted a pull request to Nixpkgs.

Nixpkgs PR

I might have a crack at building a Debian package, but I'm not sure whether I'll build any other package formats myself. I'm more than happy for other people to package Snippet Expander for their preferred Linux distro, or universal packaging format.

So, for the time being best bet is to checkout the source and build it yourself, instructions are on the repository's readme.

Snippet Expander source code on SourceHut

Quick Demo on YouTube

If you want to see Snippet Expander in action, I did a quick demo in a YouTube video on my Always Developing channel.

Snippet Expander: v1.0.1 released! 🎉 | Always Developing #226

Enjoy!

Hope you find Snippet Expander useful and enjoy using it. If you have any questions or feature requests, please get in touch via either of the project's mailing lists, IRC channel, or directly via the contact methods on this site.

snippetexpander-discuss mailing list

#snippetexpander IRC channel on the Libera.Chat network

Contact Page