Text-Expansion: how to incorporate commandline-output into replacement-strings? // Text-expansion only working for pure string-to-string replacements.

[Gewerd-Strauss]

Consider the examples provided in the wiki-section on text-expansion.

I have been wholly unable to replicate any text replacement which is not exclusively of the type "string" >> other-string"`.

This unfortunately also means the successful execution of shell commands to place their output into the replacement-string is (seemingly) not possible.
This means that what seems to be an action to f.e. get the current time or date; instead solely the trigger-string gets cleared, and then nothing happens. I.e. :time -> <NONE>.

This happens for exclusively every instance set up this way.
I can get strings to print, but only by converting

trigger[":ds",   type[format_date["%Y-%m-%d"]]]

into

":ds" >>  "date +%Y-%m-%d"

Nonetheless, none of the command outputs - whichever way I seem to try to construct them - actually inserts command results. Normal, pure-text replacements like

":cb" >> "```\n\n```"

will work, but anything that requires any sort of command evaluation will just not.

I have honestly no real clue why this is the case.

I am running Mint 22.2 Zara, using keymapper 5.3.1-11-g3be1a1b/keymapperd 5.3.1-11-g3be1a1b.

keymapper(d) are symlinked to .local/bin/, but are located under my repositories:

gewerd-strauss@gewerdstrauss-B650E-AORUS-PRO-X-USB4:~$ ls -la $(which keymapper keymapperd)
lrwxrwxrwx 1 gewerd-strauss gewerd-strauss 76 Feb  7 09:42 /home/gewerd-strauss/.local/bin/keymapper -> /media/gewerd-strauss/data/Repositories/linux-only/keymapper/build/keymapper
lrwxrwxrwx 1 gewerd-strauss gewerd-strauss 77 Feb  7 09:42 /home/gewerd-strauss/.local/bin/keymapperd -> /media/gewerd-strauss/data/Repositories/linux-only/keymapper/build/keymapperd

All in all, I am at the end of my rope here. At this point I am not even sure if what I am trying to do / what I understand the example should do actually lines up with what it is actually doing, or if there is something uniquely strange going on here.

Hopefully I am just really really stupid and I'm missing something here.

---

Besides that, thank you for this utility. Coming from Windows with a massive amount of self-written hotkeys via Autohotkey, switching to linux has been daunting. Being able to re-implement at least some portion of those even makes this viable.

---

Sincerely,
~Gw

[houmain]

Hi, this is from the corresponding section of the README:

# when last character of string is typed, undo using backspace and output new string
substitute = ? "$0" >> repeat[Backspace, sub[length["$0"], 1]] "$1"
substitute["Cat", "Dog"]

# generate the string to output with an external program
substituteExec = ? "$0" >> repeat[Backspace, sub[length["$0"], 1]] \
  $(keymapperctl --type "$($1)")
substituteExec[":whoami", "whoami"]

So, you would have to put this in your configuration:

substitute = ? "$0" >> repeat[Backspace, sub[length["$0"], 1]] "$1"
substituteExec = ? "$0" >> repeat[Backspace, sub[length["$0"], 1]] $(keymapperctl --type "$($1)")

substituteExec[":ds", "date +%Y-%m-%d"]
substitute[":cb", "```\n\n```"]