¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Previously.

Problem statement: espanso edit corp opens a config file, but saving it doesn’t take immediate effect.

At $DAILYJOB I keep a separate match file for work-specific snippets (“corp”). Espanso supports multiple match files under match/:

% espanso edit corp
Editing file: /Users/thiago.perrotta/Library/Application Support/espanso/match/corp.yml

After saving, the new trigger doesn’t expand. Espanso doesn’t auto-reload on file change.

The intended fix:

% espanso restart

Except that it has timed out:

unable to start service: timed out
Hint: sometimes this happens because another Espanso process is left running for some reason.
      Please try running 'espanso restart' or manually killing all Espanso processes, then try again.

A stale process was holding the IPC socket lock, so espanso restart, espanso start, and even espanso service start all timed out — while espanso status cheerfully reported espanso is not running. The hint is right, but its suggested remedy (run espanso restart again) doesn’t break the cycle.

On macOS, espanso runs as a launchd service. The reliable escape hatch is to bounce it through launchd, which owns the process:

% launchctl kickstart -k "gui/$(id -u)/com.federicoterzi.espanso"

-k kills the existing instance before restarting it. After that, corp.yml expands again.

Meta: should I create a trigger for this command? :P

🤖 Drafted with /bloggify.