Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 4

Full-featured text editor for Android. Good in a pinch on my phone, better on my tablet with either the onscreen or a Bluetooth keyboard.

Storage

Support for the major cloud storage providers, plus local, WebDAV and SFTP means that I can edit a file direct from my Nextcloud instance, or off of my desktop in the next room, or off of a server.

Also connects to GitHub and to GitLab servers. It would be nice if I could connect directly to any Git repository, because then I could connect straight to Codeberg, but to be fair, I wouldn’t have thought of that if it didn’t offer the specific forges.

Local files and cloud credentials are only stored on the device.

Usage

QuickEdit remembers your session, so I always have a couple of files available (including the migraine log I’ve kept since 2008, which can take a while to scroll through on a touch screen, but opens where I left off and doesn’t slow the editor down at all.) right when I need them, and it’ll pull down the latest version when I open it.

Finally started tracking system dark/light mode with the most recent update.

There’s a free version with ads that you can try out, but it’s easily worth the ~$4 one-time price for the paid version.

A basic on-device gallery app that lets you view, browse, organize and delete your photos entirely on your own phone, and open them in other apps for sharing. No tracking, no ads. Works as a file picker too, when you’re already in another app and want to load a photo. Mostly replaces the offline use cases for Google Photos.

There’s a simple editor for cropping, rotating, markup and a few pre-defined filters. (IIRC the Simple Gallery app it was forked from had a few more adjustments it could do, but the Fossify project had some concerns about the license.) I’d like to use it to crop photos for iNaturalist, but there’s currently a bug where it loses EXIF data when editing. Even when I want to remove GPS coordinates, I don’t want to remove the time the photo was taken!

Update: There’s a similar bug where it discards location when used as a file picker, which has tripped me up a few times. Sharing from the gallery app keeps the metadata intact, though.

Anyway, if you do want to sync your photos with a cloud service, you can use another app for syncing while still using this one locally. I’m currently uploading to Nextcloud, and planning to try Immich when I can set aside some time to set up an Immich server.

When I was first experimenting with the Gemini Protocol, Lagrange quickly became my favorite Gemini client on the desktop. It’s visually clean, it’s fast, it runs well (and stable) on Linux, macOS and Windows, and the UI works the way you’d expect it to coming from using a web browser, down to details like middle-clicking to open a link in a new background tab.

Lagrange registers itself on all three platforms as a handler for gemini: URLs and will send http: and https: URLs to the desktop’s default handler, so it’s possible to seamlessly follow links between Geminispace and the web, switching between Lagrange and Firefox/Vivaldi/etc.

You might still need an extra step to open links from Firefox.

The author has also been fast to implement useful conventions like the subscription scheme, conveniences like opening linked images inline and giving each capsule its own color scheme, and related small-internet (or “smol internet” if you prefer) protocols like Titan (used for uploading files, which was deliberately left out of Gemini itself), Spartan and Nex (even more minimalist!), and Misfin (for sending messages). And yes, it also works with older protocols like Finger and Gopher.

Off the Desktop

The mobile version is allegedly still in beta, but works surprisingly well on my Android phone! It has all the same features, except it’s a single screen instead of tabs and windows.

There’s also a terminal-based interface that looks as much as possible like the desktop app as you can get with text characters, colors and (optionally) emoji. I’ve only played with it a little bit since I couldn’t get the AppImage to run and kept putting off compiling it myself. I finally did and it feels a lot more natural to use than amfora (the classic monochrome terminal-based client). The key commands for following links seemed weird at first glance, but I got used to them in a matter of seconds, whereas I still get tripped up in amfora.

Notes

On Linux, the Flatpak has worked more consistently for me than the AppImage has. Fedora offers a package as well, but it tends to lag behind a bit.

Agate is a simple Gemini Protocol server. It’s a single binary, needs only minimal configuration, and sets up TLS certs for you. It only serves static files, but you can also enable multiple hostnames, directory listings and custom headers if you want to, so you can redirect pages that have moved or use it as a download server.

It’s fast. It’s stable. I’ve been running my Gemini capsule on it for three years* and I don’t think it’s ever crashed. Updates are a matter of downloading the latest release from GitHub, killing the old process, and launching the new one. No need to mess with Docker or anything like that unless you want to.

If you’re reading the Gemini version of this review, it’s serving the page right now!

Since I don’t have root on the VPS I’m running it on, I can’t set up a proper system service, but I can add cron jobs, so it’s easy enough to schedule one for @reboot pointing to my launch script.

Running a Gemini Server on a VPS Without Root

The Gemini Protocol as a whole does support dynamically-generated pages and simple interactions, and there are other servers that can handle both.

A perfect balance of powerful and lightweight, Notepad++ is far more capable than Notepad, but doesn’t complicate things like a full IDE.

This Windows text editor launches fast enough I don’t even bother using Notepad anymore. It works great for editing large files, using custom syntax highlighting, multifile / regex / multiline search and replace, sorting, dealing with duplicates, and all kinds of advanced things you might want to do on a text file or group of them. I’ve opened multi-megabyte CSV files, sorted or filtered, and re-saved in the time it would take Excel to parse them.

Free Software, in both senses of the word.

Notepad++ is my main text editor on Windows, just as BBEdit is on MacOS. As for Linux, Notepad++ works great on Wine. There’s a little more overhead though, so when I don’t need its advanced features I still use Featherpad for speed.