A text expander for Linux.

Normally, a text expander is essentially be a keylogger, because it has to know what you're typing to know that it should be expanding something. But by plugging into the machinery of IMEs, we can implement a text expander that is not a keylogger (or rather, it only logs your keys during the time when it’s absolutely necessary). You start shinran only when you are about to type a trigger word (an idea I got from shin). This has the added benefits that we can show autocompletions.

shin + espanso = shinran

There are two frontends for shinran: a native Wayland frontend using Input method v2, and an IBus frontend, that’s mostly intended for GNOME (which likely will never support the Wayland-native method).

Shinran uses the Espanso config format for defining text expansions. See “Implementation status” below for information on which Espanso features are currently supported by shinran.

E.g., on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libxkbcommon-dev

Simply compile the binary and set up a trigger to execute it.

cargo build --bin shinran_wayland --release
cp target/release/shinran_wayland ~/.local/bin/shinran_wayland

And then, e.g., for sway, put this in your config:

bindsym $mod+x exec ~/.local/bin/shinran_wayland

In order to set up the IBus frontend, the binary needs to be registered with IBus. This is handled by the Makefile:

make
sudo make install

To start shinran, the following has to be executed:

ibus engine shinran

You have to bind this to a keyboard shortcut. See here for how that works in GNOME.

• Wayland frontend
  • basic functionality
  • popup with candidates
  • retrieve application name (for filtering)
  • cursor hints
  • image matches
• IBus frontend
  • basic functionality
  • popup with candidates
    • basic popup
    • candidate selection
  • retrieve application name (for filtering)
  • cursor hints
  • image matches
• Backend
  • load Espanso format
  • trigger matches
  • regex matches
  • built-in matches
    • basic text insertion of built-in matches
    • popup with debug information
  • date extension
  • random extension
  • echo extension
  • shell extension
  • script extension
  • clipboard extension, see #27
  • choice extension (can this be done with the candidate popup?)
  • form extension (not sure I want to implement that…)

The IBus frontend code started out as a Rust-port of shin (GPLv3).

The Wayland frontend code started out as a Rust-port of anthywl (ISC license) with inspiration from wlhangul (MIT license).

A lot of the backend code started out as a copy of espanso (GPLv3), especially the shinran_config crate and the shinran_render crate (which were copies of espanso-config and espanso-render respectively).