#2766·espanso

Espanso is extremely slow on Wayland, and KDE / GNOME are dropping X11

Author: IgnacioJPickeringCreated Aug 13, 2026Updated Sep 9, 2026
Labelsenhancementneeds-triage

First, thank you for developing this incredible tool! I understand this request is possibly extremely hard, but I thought it would be a good idea to bring some attention to this issue.

Description

GNOME 50 has already dropped X11 support, and KDE Plasma plans to drop support by 6.9. I have tried espanso on Wayland, but it is extremely slow, to the point of being unusable for my purposes. I would like to propose some sort of plan to improve the performance on Wayland, or a default configuration that provides good performance, if this is possible.

Motivation

Wayland seems to be the future of Linux desktops, and espanso is the best snippet expansion tool on Linux. A performant implementation on Wayland should be a priority. If there are issues specific to Wayland, maybe fully isolating what they are and coming up with workarounds, or bringing them up to the Wayland devs so that espanso-like tools can do their work would be a good idea.

Alternatives

There aren't any alternatives that I can think of, except just accepting that the Wayland experience will not be as good.

Have you tried building it? Or would you like it?

  • I'd be willing to contribute this feature to Espanso myself.