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Create spoken macros and snippets

If you type the same boilerplate over and over — a signature, a standard reply, a code stub — you can bind it to a spoken trigger phrase. Say the trigger and YazSes types the expansion. Two features do this; both are off by default.

  • Say-Macro (macros) — the fuller mechanism: triggers live in a dedicated macros.toml, support text and snippet expansions, and can place the caret with a ${cursor} marker and substitute ${clipboard}, ${date}, ${time}, and ${author}.
  • Voice Snippets (snippets) — a lightweight inline expander: trigger → template pairs configured directly in config.toml under [snippets].

Both match on whole-utterance exact match, so a trigger appearing inside ordinary prose never fires mid-dictation.

Say-Macro

1. Enable the feature

yazses features enable macros

2. Write your macros

Create macros.toml next to config.toml (~/.config/yazses/macros.toml). Each macro is a [[macro]] table:

# ~/.config/yazses/macros.toml
[[macro]]
trigger = "insert my signature"
type = "text"
text = "Best regards,\nMohsen"

[[macro]]
trigger = "new python function"
type = "snippet"
snippet = "def ${cursor}():\n    pass"

[[macro]]
trigger = "today's date"
type = "text"
text = "${date}"
  • type = "text" or type = "snippet" — both type their body; snippet is meant for code and supports the ${cursor} marker, which leaves the caret where you put it after typing.
  • Placeholders ${clipboard}, ${date}, ${time}, ${author} are substituted at expansion time. ${author} comes from [macros] author.

3. Point the config at the file (optional) and restart

[macros] path defaults to macros.toml (relative to the config dir), so the file above is found automatically. To use a different location or set the author:

# config.toml
[macros]
enabled = true            # written by `yazses features enable macros`
path = "macros.toml"      # relative to config dir, or an absolute path
author = "Mohsen"         # value substituted for ${author}

yazses restart            # apply

A broken macro entry is skipped and logged — it never breaks the daemon.

Voice Snippets

For simple text expansions without a separate file, use [snippets] in config.toml:

yazses features enable snippets

# config.toml
[snippets]
enabled = true
[snippets.entries]
"insert my signature" = "Best regards,\nMohsen"
"my address" = "1 Example Street, Bologna"

yazses restart

Say insert my signature and YazSes types the stored template.

See also