linuxPIPEpower

joined 2 years ago
 

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/56895639

My friend who uses google wants to share their calendar (read-only). I don't use google. How can they do that?

 

My friend who uses google wants to share their calendar (read-only). I don't use google. How can they do that?

[–] linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It’s almost exactly a copy of reddit

The magic of reddit isn't just the structure of the website, it's the fact that there are so many people posting to diverse niche subjects. Although one structural thing lemmy is really lacking is the wiki and post flare components; those help give experts a reason to make effortful contributions as they do not fade into the ether after a few days.

That said, if reddit was new in 2025 or 2020, I don't think it would take off as much. It gained popularity in a previous time of the internet and is now coasting off that.

it generates an html preview in a sidebar.

the benefit over any other 2 column editor is that geany is a real text editor with lots of shortcuts, configs and tools. so the editing part is a lot better. markdown is just kind of tacked on though.

If by GUI you mean WYSIWYG, I don't know of any! Very mysterious to me why this has not been properly taken on given the popularity of markdown.

Once every year or so I check out everything that's available and try out any new or upgraded packages I can find. All have at least one of the following issues:

  • Massive bloat, often electron is significant culprit
  • Stuck on the 2 column editor concept, generally with only rudimentary markdown implementation
  • Fly by night new projects which are quickly abandoned in beta state
  • Only want to access files within a certain subdirectory which may or may not be configurable; this is rarely the only problem but it's very common in the PKM-type packages

I never quite got it to work properly but Zettlr suits some people. You might be able to cobble something together in Codium. Both those have the bloat issue. There are some self hosted browser-based editors if you are interested in that sort of project. The best and closest I have found is Joplin but it isn't actually a markdown editor. I wish someone would spin an editor off from its code base; surely the skeleton is there.

[–] linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I used to use typora; it does have a really nice convert web->markdown. I think that it is done by some javascript or something because the other tools that have comparable quality I can think of off the top of my head are obsidian, joplin clipper and a couple of firefox extensions. I agree that in my experience pandoc and a couple other cli tools didn't produce such nice results.

I also think in all those cases the browser is doing some of the work because it renders the page, discards a lot of irrelevant stuff, then you copy/convert just a selection portion of what's visible. Whereas if you, for example, grab a raw html page through curl and send it to pandoc, none of that is done. You probably aren't using Select All when you copy a page to typora, but pandoc would be faced with the entire page. I don't know if there is a way to access the Reader View from the terminal but it would go a distance to cleaning up your pandoc conversion if you could start from there (for those sites on which it's available).

I tried and failed to do the same thing but it's not markdown's fault. No matter how many bells and whistles markdown would get, the issue is in the conversion from html part.

Sorry I was trying to follow your meaning, because the example of absent rich text you gave was underlines. There is already basic text formatting support such as strong, emphasis, headings and links.

You could style any, all or none of those to have underlining. Whatever chosen rendering, they all have meaning independent from the applied style. What you are asking for is to have something that is purely a display style without any structural value. This is not coming to markdown any time soon. Hardly anyone uses underline as its own thing in html anymore, for good reasons.

Maybe this article will help to further explain.

Native SVG handling would be completely out of scope. The point of markdown is that it is supposed to be understandable in its plain text format. SVG is incompatible with that. The closest thing would be like mermaid charts but I think it's quite a stretch even then.

I think you should just use HTML, it has a much larger array of tools that would suit your needs. Markdown is purposely constrained because it enables much more portability.

When I do free tech support for someone who I think could have solved it themselves I just make them solve it themselves by asking questions. "What information do you have?" "What have you tried?" "What does the error say?" "What do you think the error means? Is it giving a hint?" "When did you start having the problem?" "What can we eliminate?" "What did a search search suggest?" "What does the documentation say?"

"Did you try rebooting, reconnecting?"

My personal bias is being pro markdown. I do not know groff so below is based on some inferences on my part.

But I don't think markdown is suitable for man pages, which contain specific kinds of information structured in a prescribed way. Markdown doesn't and can't know about these.

As I understand it, because of using a more sophisticated structure than MD, its possible to do things like:

  • shell completion can be generated automatically from the man pages.
  • a website like mankier.com which renders man pages in HTML and adds hyperlinks every time an option or argument

That's not rich text. Rich text is when a format is applied without structural reason.

You could have a markdown interpreter that displayed **this** *this* or _this_ using any arbitrary format. You could change the color, weight, border, drop shadow, opacity, mouse over effects, font face... Any attribute.

Lemmy has conventions but all * really means is emphasis.

[–] linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

If you want to save a website use html

[–] linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Someone can correct this but iirc some implementations of markdown have image options like this:

![alt text](/path/to/IMG.png|200px "description text")

Others put the size in { } after the main image item.

Rich text is contrary to the structural focus of markdown. Why should it be added?

There are a couple of apps on f droid that implement this with SMS.

 

I find Firefox Translator doesn't pick up a lot of pages. The location bar button doesn't appear.

It works if I access via the hamburger menu. It is very slow to have to go via the menu for each individual page. I find no shortcut key or anything.

Sometimes this will correctly guess the original language but often not. It is saying pages are English even when they have little to no english, even using different alphabets.

Is there something the website admins can do to tell firefox what language it is? Encoding? Meta tag?

Can I force the location-bar translate button to persist on all pages regardless of what language it thinks the page is in? Then I could save going through the menu.

Here is an example: https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/

 

I want to move a directory with a bunch of subdirectories and files. But I have the feeling there might be some symlinks to a few of them elsewhere on the file system. (As in the directory contains the targets of symlinks.)

How do I search all files for symlinks pointing to them?

Some combination of find, stat, ls, realpath, readlink and maybe xargs? I can't quite figure it out.

 

Title is TLDR. More info about what I'm trying to do below.

My daily driver computer is Laptop with an SSD. No possibility to expand.

So for storage of lots n lots of files, I have an old, low resource Desktop with a bunch of HDDs plugged in (mostly via USB).

I can access Desktop files via SSH/SFTP on the LAN. But it can be quite slow.

And sometimes (not too often; this isn't a main requirement) I take Laptop to use elsewhere. I do not plan to make Desktop available outside the network so I need to have a copy of required files on Laptop.

Therefor, sometimes I like to move the remote files from Desktop to Laptop to work on them. To make a sort of local cache. This could be individual files or directory trees.

But then I have a mess of duplication. Sometimes I forget to put the files back.

Seems like Laptop could be a lot more clever than I am and help with this. Like could it always fetch a remote file which is being edited and save it locally?

Is there any way to have Laptop fetch files, information about file trees, etc, located on Desktop when needed and smartly put them back after editing?

Or even keep some stuff around. Like lists of files, attributes, thumbnails etc. Even browsing the directory tree on Desktop can be slow sometimes.

I am not sure what this would be called.

Ideas and tools I am already comfortable with:

  • rsync is the most obvious foundation to work from but I am not sure exactly what would be the best configuration and how to manage it.

  • luckybackup is my favorite rsync GUI front end; it lets you save profiles, jobs etc which is sweet

  • freeFileSync is another GUI front end I've used but I am preferring lucky/rsync these days

  • I don't think git is a viable solution here because there are already git directories included, there are many non-text files, and some of the directory trees are so large that they would cause git to choke looking at all the files.

  • syncthing might work. I've been having issues with it lately but I may have gotten these ironed out.

Something a little more transparent than the above would be cool but I am not sure if that exists?

Any help appreciated even just idea on what to web search for because I am stumped even on that.

 

I just noticed that eza can now display total disk space used by directories!

I think this is pretty cool. I wanted it for a long time.

There are other ways to get the information of course. But having it integrated with all the other options for listing directories is fab. eza has features like --git-awareness, --tree display, clickable --hyperlink, filetype --icons and other display, permissions, dates, ownerships, and other stuff. being able to mash everything together in any arbitrary way which is useful is handy. And of course you can --sort=size

docs:

  --total-size               show the size of a directory as the size of all
                             files and directories inside (unix only)

It also (optionally) color codes the information. Values measures in kb, mb, and gb are clear. Here is a screenshot to show that:

eza --long -h --total-size --sort=oldest --no-permissions --no-user

Of course it take a little while to load large directories so you will not want to use by default.

Looks like it was first implemented Oct 2023 with some fixes since then. (Changelog). PR #533 - feat: added recursive directory parser with `--total-size` flag by Xemptuous

 

My dream: I want a way to arbitrarily close and later open groups of applications including their states such as open files, window arrangement, scrollback, even undo histories etc. So working on a specific project I can close everything neatly and return to it later.

In my research/experiments here is what I come up with, do you agree?:

  1. in the terminal-only environment this would be tmux or another multiplexer

  2. But when you start including GUI applications (which I must), then it is something else that doesn't exactly exist

  3. Applications store their current states in a variety of places and some of them don't really do restoring in any way so it would be hard to force.

  4. the best option for this is something like xpra where you can have multiple sessions. If you had a machine that stayed powered-on all the time it might be possible to create sessions, log in remotely and use them that way.

  5. Using xpra or similar the sessions are never really actually closed. You would only close the connection from the local machine. If the machine faces a power off then too bad. As far as I can se there is basically no way to accomplish this goal where power-offs are accommodated.

I have tried some remote-login options but they are too slow for normal use. I tend to have pretty low-end hardware running (because so far it works for most things) so maybe if I upgraded it would improve.

  1. is it plausible?
  2. how to estimate hardware/performance needs of host, client and LAN? anything else to consider?

I typically use manjaro + XFCE but would be willing to try something different to accomplish the goal. I only want to do this locally on LAN not remotely.

re XFCE session managerXFCE has session management but the majority of programs don't totally work with. Like maybe the application will re-open when the session is restored but no files will be open even if they were when session was saved. Or distribution through workspaces, window size etc will not be restored.

 

I am really struggling to replace facebook messenger / whatsapp for a few casual conversations. My friends and I are all wanting to move away. We are not heavy users of this but need it to work. I think the requirements are:

  • floss client for android, linux, windows

  • persistent history across devices

  • reasonable security

  • don't need to self host server

  • can send a message to offline user, they get it when they come online

  • not tied to or reliant on phone number / cell service

  • ETA: end user documentation explaining how to set up and common troubleshooting

tried:

  • matrix: the thing with having to keep track of room keys and stuff is too complicated. every time someone uses a new device it is a ton of issues and we could never quite get it ironed out

  • signal: tied to phone number, no history across devices

  • xmpp: similar to matrix the key situation is confusing, also no cross device history

  • ETA: simpleX: a lot of people here are mentioning simpleX. It didn't come up in previous investigations so will give it a shot.

    • ETA 2: It doesn't seem to have persistent history across devices. Clarification?

I actually didn't think this would be such a problem but it is breaking us. we don't need a lot of sophisticated features like voice, video, moderation, 1000s of participants, spam protection etc that seem to be of concern to the projects. just simple text chat.

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