Packages Basics

Packages make it easy to reuse snippets created by other people, or share yours with the world. Thanks to the official package repository, Espanso Hub, and the built-in package manager, using them is a breeze.

Installing a package

Packages can be installed from multiple sources. For most users, we recommend installing them from the Espanso Hub, as those packages have been manually verified by the Espanso team.

For advanced use-cases, you can also install packages from external sources. This section assumes you'll install packages from the Hub, as that's the most common behavior.

After choosing your package of choice on the Hub, you can install it by opening a terminal and running:

espanso install <package_name>

with <package_name> being the identifier for your desired package.

For example, if you want to install the lorem package, you can do so with:

espanso install lorem

Installing a specific version

Espanso installs the latest version by default, but you can also install a specific one with:

espanso install <package_name> --version <package_version>

For example:

espanso install html-utils-package --version 0.1.0

Forcing an installation

By default, Espanso will prevent installing a package if already installed. However, there are times when you might want to force an installation anyway.

For example, if you locally edited a package to adapt some changes and you would like to roll-back to the official version, you can do so with the --force option:

espanso install lorem --force

This will force Espanso to install the package anyway.

Uninstalling a package

You can uninstall a package by opening a terminal and running:

espanso uninstall <package_name>

such as:

espanso uninstall lorem

Listing installed packages

Espanso provides a command to easily check which packages are installed. Open a terminal and run:

espanso package list

Where are packages stored?

Under the hoods, packages are nothing more than regular YAML configuration files with some metadata. In recent Espanso versions, these are stored alongside your YAML matches, under the packages directory.

You can find where packages are stored by running the following command in a terminal:

espanso path packages

Updating packages

You can update a package by running the following command in a terminal:

espanso package update <package_name>

For example:

espanso package update lorem

Updating all packages

You can also update all packages at once by running the following command:

espanso package update all