Text expanders are powerful productivity tools that allow users to create shortcuts that expand into longer pieces of text. In this ongoing series, I’ll document my journey of building a text expander in Go, sharing both the technical challenges and solutions I encounter along the way.
Project Goals
- Create a lightweight, cross-platform text expander
- Build an efficient snippet management system
- Implement real-time text expansion
- Design a user-friendly configuration system
- Keep the codebase maintainable and well-tested
Getting Started
I’m starting with a simple architecture that consists of three main components.
- A keyboard event listener to detect the typed shortcuts
- A snippet manager (basically a file that stores the snippets)
- An expansion engine that converts the shortcuts to complete text.
Development Log
Week 1: Project Setup
Dec 12th, 2024:
- Set up the basic project structure
- Implemented initial snippet management system
- Started research on cross-platform keyboard event handling
- Make it brew installable and add the documentation for the installation details.
Technical Challenges & Solutions
This section will be updated as challenges are encountered and solved Lessons Learned This section will be populated as the project progresses
Future Plans
- Add support for dynamic expansions (date, time, custom variables)
- Implement a GUI for snippet management
- Add cloud sync capabilities
- Create a plugin system for custom expansions
This is a living document that will be updated as the project progresses. Check back for regular updates on implementation details, challenges faced, and solutions discovered.