A few days ago I released v1.1.0 of Snippet Expander, “Your little expandable text snippets helper, for Linux”.
Changelog:
* Abbreviations that end with another abbreviation are now allowed
* Abbreviations in pasted text are no longer expanded
* Debian package no longer built for releases
* Switched back to MIT license
* Dependencies updated
Allowing an abbreviation to end with another abbreviation was a fun one to fix. Previously you could not have an abbreviation like “hw;” that expands to “Hello, World”, and a “w;” abbreviation that expands to say “World”, because if you typed “hw;” it would recognise the “;” trigger key, step backwards and find “w;” and expand it. That would leave you with “hWorld”.
To fix it, I had to keep tabs on the longest match as I kept walking back until there were no more matches, and then use the last saved match. Pretty obvious in hindsight.
I’ve also disabled expansion when pasting text in this release. I’ve had this on my todo list for over a year as I’d sometimes hit the problem when using the Search and Paste window, with text within the body of the snippet expanding when it shouldn’t.
With this release I’ve stopped building the Debian package. It’s difficult to maintain a Debian package outside of the Debian project and keep up to date with the changes to dependencies. You also really need to create .deb packages for both Debian and Ubuntu as their library versions often drift apart and then come back together during the lifecycle of releases. And if you have a stable application that doesn’t need any updates for a while, it’s possible the .deb you built for that version may become out of date when the distro updates the versions of some libs. At that point, you then need to start creating .deb packages for each major version of Debian and Ubuntu that you wish to support. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably best that package definitions are maintained in distro repos, at least for the more brittle package formats.
This project started out using the permissive MIT license, as that’s what I prefer, and it’s the norm for Go projects. Then at some point I decided I should probably use GPLv2, and I’m not sure why. So I’ve contacted all the code contributors to Snippet Expander (that’ll be just me), and we all (I) agreed to relicense back to MIT.
Apart from the usual update of dependencies, that’s it, enjoy. 😄
Tag: https://git.sr.ht/~ianmjones/snippetexpander/refs/v1.1.0
Binaries: https://git.sr.ht/~ianmjones/snippetexpander/refs/download/v1.1.0/snippetexpander-v1.1.0.tgz
