Espanso: [doc][macOS] Synchronisation not using symlink folder

[Maybach91]

Hej,

according to the documentation i tried to move my config folder to Dropbox.

I've tried the following:

macOS
By default, the espanso configuration folder resides in this folder (change “user” with your username):

/Users/user/Library/Preferences/espanso
The first step is moving this folder in your Dropbox folder, for example in:

/Users/user/Dropbox/espanso
Now you need to create a symbolic link. Open the Terminal and type the following command, making sure you specify the correct paths:

ln -s "/Users/user/Dropbox/espanso" "/Users/user/Library/Preferences/espanso"
Now restart espanso and you should be ready to go!

And within the Library/Preferences/espanso folder i get the following after restart espanso:

It creates a new default.yml and using this instead of the symlink created one.

I think the last command to create a symlink is wrong. The symlink should be created within /Users/user/Library/Preferences/ instead of /Users/user/Library/Preferences/espanso. To get the following:

↑ this is working for me. So maybe just fix it in the documentation? :)

[federico-terzi]

Hey @Maybach91,

Thanks for pointing that out! This is most probably my mistake. As soon as I get my hands on a mac I'll try it out and update the docs accordingly.

Thanks for your help :)

[timorunge]

Hey there,

the actual documentation and the way how the Symlinks should be created on MacOS is correct (there is no difference to a Linux based system). I've re-verified the same on my Mac (even without stopping espanso before doing the change).

[Maybach91]

@federico-terzi Thanks!

@timorunge yea, nothing wrong with creating the symlink in general. its just that the symlink should be created in a different folder (within the Preferences folder) instead inside the Preferences/espanso folder, i guess. Because its only working when the symlink is in the Preferences folder

[timorunge]

@Maybach91 the actual problem is, that if a folder with the given name is present OS is automatically creating the Symlink inside the existing folder. If the folder is not present everything is fine.

So:

espanso stop
mv /Users/user/Library/Preferences/espanso /Users/user/Dropbox/espanso
ln -s /Users/user/Library/Preferences/espanso /Users/user/Dropbox/espanso
espanso start

will do the trick.

You can easily test this via

mkdir -p /tmp/test/espanso
ln -s ~/.config/espanso/ /tmp/test/espanso # I'm storing my config over here, even on MacOS
ls -alG /tmp/test/espanso/

and via (remove the test folder before via rm -rf /tmp/test/espanso):

mkdir -p /tmp/test
ln -s ~/.config/espanso/ /tmp/test/espanso
ls -alG /tmp/test/espanso/

[federico-terzi]

I see, that's a strange behaviour indeed! I'll add a note in the docs, stating that there should be no folder named "espanso" when creating the link.

[atika]

# stop espanso
espanso stop

# move the espanso folder in preferences to dropbox
mv /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/espanso /Users/<username>/Dropbox/Library/Preferences/

# link the espanso folder in dropbox back to Preferences folder
# no need to define the full destination path or you can even create a relative link
ln -s /Users/<username>/Dropbox/Library/Preferences/espanso /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/

# start espanso
espanso start

l /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/ | grep espanso
# rwxr-xr-x  username  staff    49 B    Tue May 12 11:41:41 2020    espanso  ⇒ /Users/<username>/Dropbox/Library/Preferences/espanso

This created as you saw a symlink to the dropbox espanso folder into an espanso folder in Preferences instead of the root of the Preferences folder.

ln -s "/Users/user/Dropbox/espanso" "/Users/user/Library/Preferences/espanso"

This is the same method on Linux, just the paths are different.

[federico-terzi]

Hey @atika,
Thank you for the suggestion, I'll test out this approach in the upcoming days.
Cheers

[atika]

As an alternative you can do:

# Go to the preferences folder
cd /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/

# Move the folder to Dropbox
mv espanso /Users/<username>/Dropbox/Library/Preferences/

# Create a symlink into the current folder (absolute)
ln -s /Users/<username>/Dropbox/Library/Preferences/espanso
# Or even something like this (relative)
ln -s ../../Dropbox/Library/Preferences/espanso