Type any Unicode character with Espanso

Couple days ago while I was adding bookmarks to the PDF books by Ajarn Supee, I have to type in a Sansakrit character, Yamakkan (U+0E4F; Thai: ยามักการ). It is not on the Thai keyboard layout. After a couple fail attempts at using the Alt+X method, I gave up and turn to Espanso.

Espanso is a text expansion application written in Rust. I used it some time ago while working as a Research Assistant in designing an ontology (See gh:krerkkiat/espanso-ontology).

In this case, we will use Espanso's matching rule to type in the Yamakkan character. We can start by running

espanso edit

to open its match file in an editor. Then, we can add a new matching rule.

matches:

  # Other matching rules ...

  - trigger: ":yamakkan"
    replace: "\u0e4e"

Now, when I type :yamakkan it will get replaced with the Yamakkan character.