Compilation

This document tries to explain the various steps needed to build espanso. (Work in progress).

Prerequisites

These are the basic tools required to build espanso:

A recent Rust compiler. You can install it following these instructions: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
A C/C++ compiler. There are multiple of them depending on the platform, but espanso officially supports the following:
- On Windows, you should use the MSVC compiler. The easiest way to install it is by downloading Visual Studio and checking "Desktop development with C++" in the installer: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/
- On macOS, you should use the official build tools that come with Xcode. If you don't want to install Xcode, you should be able to download only the build tools by executing xcode-select —install and following the instructions.
- On Linux, you should use the default C/C++ compiler (it's usually GCC). On Ubuntu/Debian systems, you can install them with sudo apt install build-essential
Espanso heavily relies on cargo make for the various packaging steps. You can install it by running:

cargo install --force cargo-make

Linux

Espanso on Linux comes in two different flavors: one for X11 and one for Wayland. If you don't know which one to choose, follow these steps to determine which one you are running: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/325972

Necessary packages

If compiling on Ubuntu X11:

sudo apt install libx11-dev libxtst-dev libxkbcommon-dev libdbus-1-dev libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-dev

AppImage

The AppImage is a convenient format to distribute Linux applications, as besides the binary, it also bundles all the required libraries.

You can create the AppImage by running (this will work on X11 systems):

cargo make create-app-image --profile release

Or if you are on Wayland:

cargo make create-app-image --profile release --env NO_X11=true

You will find the resulting AppImage in the target/linux/AppImage/out folder.

Advanced

Espanso offers a few flags that might be necessary if you want to further tune the resulting binary.

Disabling modulo (GUI features)

Espanso includes a component known as modulo, which handles most of the graphical-related parts of the tool. For example, the Search bar or Forms are handled by it.

If you don't want them, you can pass the --env NO_MODULO=true flag to any of the previous cargo make commands to remove support for it.

Keep in mind that espanso was designed with modulo as a first class citizen, so the experience might be far from perfect without it.

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