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201

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive

« Last post by Nod5 on October 31, 2019, 04:40 AM »

I stopped using tagspaces.  Many times I have a blank screen; there's something in their electron application that fails at times- at least for me.  I even reinstalled and the problem was there.  I rebooted, tried again, and it worked for a bit, but stopped again after a short time.  I lost a lot of the work I'd done organizing with it when I had to switch, so that was a bummer.  Just something to watch out for.

-wraith808 (October 30, 2019, 11:05 AM)

Thanks. Good reminder also that a kind of system lock-in can happen even when all the data is plaintext and local.

The zettelkasten app alternatives superboyac mentioned

In my searches for windows software for zettel
[...] infoqube [...] connectedtext [...] sublime text editor [...] Sublimeless zettelkasten

-superboyac (October 30, 2019, 02:56 PM)

also got me thinking... Question: Are there any attempts at standards specifically for (local, plaintext, spanning multiple files) notetaking? Something akin to https://commonmark.org/ for MarkDown but for zettelkasten note taking or some other note taking approach? With a standard users could start out with a Sublime editor plugin, later jump to a VS Code plugin and then on to some standalone tool. Teams working on notes together could use different software to read/write the same synced set of plaintext files.

(Picture in your mind the XKCD comic about standards. I don't need to link it, you all have it in memory  )

One thing a standard would settle is the identifier format. sublimeless_zk seem to use YYYMMDDhhmmss timestamps, which I like. But they have an issue tracker request for shorter format using other base systems for the identifier. Interesting idea!

A version of that would be to stick to YYYYMMDDhhmmss in plaintext but then have the decorator in the editor/plugin optionally display that as shortened via some above base-10 system. One could even go crazy short through some kind of "base-unicode" (is that a thing?) e.g. use all unicode characters (locked to some unicode version) as base. That way the first 100 000 or so identifiers would appear one character long.

202

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive

« Last post by Nod5 on October 28, 2019, 01:25 PM »

- More fun things to do with file reader output : if you put a special character (not above the number key but like zz), after the "regular" part of the file name and before all your tag-y things, then you can import that directory output into Excel, and chop it up into sections and then your notes can reference the fragment of the file name.

-TaoPhoenix (October 26, 2019, 06:23 PM)

The idea of using special characters to distinguish the tag section and individuate tags in filenames is used by the TagSpaces application, https://docs.tagspac...g-based-on-filenames . I remember trying it very long ago but might go and have another look at it now, as it seems to be actively developed.

203

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive

« Last post by Nod5 on October 25, 2019, 06:56 PM »

All this said, the tools and approach I sketched above might not be for everybody. I suspect it is more appealing to someone who already uses code editors and writes scripts a lot anyway. But no harm in giving it a look, you might find some part of it that is a fit for you.

204

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive

« Last post by Nod5 on October 25, 2019, 06:46 PM »

Isn't there a problem with filename tags in that links are broken every time you add or remove a tag?

-Dormouse (October 25, 2019, 05:54 PM)

2. make .txt plaintext "companion files" with tags in filename and notes inside next to non-plaintext files.

-Nod5 (October 25, 2019, 05:10 PM)

So, same name as companion except .txt ?

Would this be a way of tagging the companion?

-Dormouse (October 25, 2019, 05:57 PM)

Yeah, there is a trade-off between updating filename tags to reflect changes to file contents and risking breaking links/references elsewhere to that file.

I have no perfect fits-all-cases solution to that.

But here's an approach that works ok for me in many cases. Say we want to keep a photo of something or a screenshot of a webpage. First name the imagefile short but unique through timestamps. The camera likely does this by default and screenshots tools can be set to do that too. Keep that image filename unchanged going forward. Second, make a companion .txt file with additional tags in the filename, tags that can be updated over time.

C:\folder\20191022_181212.png
C:\folder\20191022_181212.png receipt raspberry pi 4.txt

We can then in other plaintext files reliably "quasi link" to the image with the short string 20191022_181212.png .

We can also find the image via Everything fairly quickly in any folder on any harddrive using only the search terms "raspberry receipt", since the .txt file will be among the matches for that search and its filename in turn contains the image filename. That search will work even if we later also add the tags "todo sell ebay" to the companion .txt

.txt companion files can also be created for other purposes, not just for tags that make the "parent" file easy to find with filename search tools. For example if we stick to a format for some companion files, like
C:\folder\20191022_181212.png -- slideshow.txt
for photos then we can make scripts that automatically use the image and that special companion file for some purpose, for example to show an image slideshow overlayed with notes (text in the image's companion).

This idea is a bit like how external .srt subtitle files for video files work in VLC. Place the files video.mp4 and video.mp4.srt next to each other and VLC will automatically load the .srt subtitle when playing the .mp4 video.

205

General Software Discussion / Re: I'm thinking of going primitive

« Last post by Nod5 on October 25, 2019, 05:10 PM »

Here are some tools I find very useful for storing and retrieving information in plaintext files. I suppose most are very well known to many DC members reading this thread already, but anyway...

- FindAndRunRobot (FARR)
Program/file launcher with powerful, customizable aliases.
https://www.donation...er/popular-apps/farr

- Everything
Instantly find any filename/path on any drive that match a search string.
https://www.voidtools.com/

- grepWin
Handy GUI for regex search inside plaintext files.
Fast enough when searching a limited set of folders.
Also does batch find and replace in multiple plaintext files.
https://github.com/stefankueng/grepWin

- ripgrep
Super fast command line regex search inside plaintext files.
Useful for finding a string inside some plaintext note when the string is not in the filename/filepath and you have no clue what folder the file with the string is in.
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

- AutoHotkey
For making scripts to superpower FARR aliases and quickly jump/switch between these other tools and text viewers/editors and File Explorer.
https://www.autohotkey.com/

- VS Code or some other general purpose code editor.
For powerful plaintext viewing, editing and formatting. Also for writing Markdown with preview.
The interface is more complex than for some standalone Markdown editors. But on the plus side code editors are power tools for transforming and navigating plaintext in a lot of ways that tend to come in handy sooner or later.
https://code.visualstudio.com/

The above tools work better when you do these things:

1. put tags in the filenames of plaintext files

2. make .txt plaintext "companion files" with tags in filename and notes inside next to non-plaintext files.

3. organize files at least roughly into (sub)folders based on topic, context or life domain. Put tags in foldernames.

4. when needed tag filenames/foldernames with timestamps (YYMMDD at minimum or YYYYMMDDhhmmss) to make them more unique.

You can speed up 1-4 with AutoHotkey, of course

The neat thing with unique filenames is that you can use them as "quasi hyperlinks" in plaintext. Like so: An AutoHotkey hotkey takes the current selection in the active VS Code window (or Notepad or any other plaintext editor/viewer you want), uses Everything under the hood to find the one unique matching full filepath, and then acts on it (open/run the file, open its folder in Explorer, ...). For example a file you name "food korean 191025.txt" will likely remain unique and so can be used as a short and quick quasi hyperlink.

The search tools FARR/Everything can also be used as bookmark managers, since URLs can be stored as individual plaintext .url files with tagged filenames.

206

General Software Discussion / Re: download online video

« Last post by Nod5 on October 24, 2019, 10:30 AM »

The command line utility youtube-dl has support for downloading streams from a lot of sites.
https://ytdl-org.git.../supportedsites.html

207

Post New Requests Here / Re: Book synopsis template

« Last post by Nod5 on October 14, 2019, 05:18 PM »

Seems like everything has to be stored in the cloud - I'm hosting this locally available on a VPN.

-fredemeister (October 13, 2019, 07:58 PM)

Yeah, Airtable is web (cloud) based. So not a good fit if you want to self-host locally.

It seems likely there are tools for this kind of thing out there already.

For example I've seen that there is a web interface app called calibre-web for the Ebook library manager Calibre. I haven't tried using nor setting up that web interface, so I can't say if it is any good.

One important thing to specify: Is your goal a system where your family members (who I assume are not all programmers!) themselves edit information about books through a locally hosted web app of some sort? Or is the goal that only you update the information and then your family reads it through locally hosted webpages?

208

Post New Requests Here / Re: Book synopsis template

« Last post by Nod5 on October 13, 2019, 04:38 AM »

Have you considered using some existing free webapp for this instead?

For example Airtable. It is quite end user friendly and you can include thumbnails, attachements, clickable links and more on each row in the database. A simple setup would be one big spreadsheet shared by all family members and then each person is tasked to add/remove/update their books in it with information for each of the data categories (columns) you have initially created.
Edit: For example this template but add an "owner" column and whatever other columns you need.

209

Post New Requests Here / Re: Idea: "FAIPS" - Find All In Page Search

« Last post by Nod5 on October 12, 2019, 01:33 PM »

A quick search suggests there are various Chrome and Firefox extensions for multi word search and highlight functionality. It could help any coders who might have a go at this if you describe which such extensions you have already tried and what you find lacking in them.

Is your goal a standalone tool for offline searching in previously downloaded .html file copies of websites? Or a browser extension?

210

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Like FileSieve but folders have first two letters of file

« Last post by Nod5 on October 12, 2019, 03:34 AM »

No problem.

I made a version of my previous script to use the string before " - " in the filename as subfolder name. Just in case someone comes here via Google looking for a complete script for that.

The script can also be easily adapted to use some other pattern by changing only the regular expression line.

Code: Autohotkey [Select]

1. #NoEnv
2. SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%
3. #SingleInstance force
4.  
5. ;AutoHotkey script to move files into subfolders named after the string before " - " in the filename
6. ;Example: the file "Lastname, Firstname - Title.txt" is moved to subfolder "Lastname, Firstname"
7. ;by Nod5 2019-10-12
8.  
9. ;How to use:
10. ;0. install https://www.autohotkey.com/
11. ;1. edit the next line with a path to the files folder. For example "C:\folder\S"
12. folder := ""
13. ;2. save the script with .ahk extension and UTF-8 BOM encoding and run it
14.  
15. ;Check that the folder exists
16. If !InStr( FileExist(folder), "D")
17.   ExitApp
18.  
19. Loop, Files, %folder%\*.*
20. {
21.   tooltip `n Moving files into subfolders ...
22.  
23.   ;get string before " - " in filename
24.   pattern := RegExReplace(A_LoopFileName, " - .*", "")
25.  
26.   ;create subfolder if not already exists
27.   If !FileExist(folder "\" pattern)
28.     FileCreateDir % folder "\" pattern
29.  
30.   ;move file to subfolder
31.   FileMove, % A_LoopFilePath, % folder "\" pattern
32. }
33. ExitApp

211

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Like FileSieve but folders have first two letters of file

« Last post by Nod5 on October 08, 2019, 04:37 AM »

This should do it.

Code: Autohotkey [Select]

1. #NoEnv
2. SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%
3. #SingleInstance force
4.  
5. ;AutoHotkey script to move files into subfolders named after the filename's first two characters
6. ;by Nod5 2019-10-08
7.  
8. ;How to use:
9. ;0. install https://www.autohotkey.com/
10. ;1. edit the next line with a path to the files folder. For example "C:\folder\S"
11. folder := ""
12. ;2. save the script with .ahk extension and UTF-8 BOM encoding and run it
13.  
14. ;Check that the folder exists
15. If !InStr( FileExist(folder), "D")
16.   ExitApp
17.  
18. Loop, Files, %folder%\*.*
19. {
20.   tooltip `n Moving files into subfolders ...
21.  
22.   ;get filename's first two characters as uppercase
23.   two_chars := SubStr(A_LoopFileName, 1, 2)
24.   two_chars := Format("{:U}", two_chars)
25.  
26.   ;create subfolder if not already exists
27.   If !FileExist(folder "\" two_chars)
28.     FileCreateDir % folder "\" two_chars
29.  
30.   ;move file to subfolder
31.   FileMove, % A_LoopFilePath, % folder "\" two_chars
32. }
33. ExitApp

In addition another script to generate a bunch of empty text files for testing/troubleshooting the above script

Code: Autohotkey [Select]

1. #NoEnv
2. SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%
3. #SingleInstance force
4.  
5. ;AutoHotkey script to generate 75 empty text files named with the format
6. ;sa_1.txt , sa_2.txt , sa_3.txt , sb_1.txt ...
7.  
8. chars := "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxyz"
9. test_folder := A_ScriptDir "\" A_Now
10. FileCreateDir, % test_folder
11. Loop, Parse, chars
12.   Loop, 3
13.     FileAppend,, % test_folder "\s" A_LoopField "_" A_Index ".txt"
14. ExitApp

212

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Feature request: automatic OCR of captured images.

« Last post by Nod5 on October 05, 2019, 04:58 PM »

Try tables and text on images, especially when the clarity is not there and the contrast is not great.  More complicated scenarios are where it started to fail for me.

-wraith808 (October 05, 2019, 04:45 PM)

Might need a preprocessing step with binarize and other transforms on image in such cases. Yes more complicated.

213

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Feature request: automatic OCR of captured images.

« Last post by Nod5 on October 05, 2019, 04:21 PM »

if you're going with the English 'fast' library data + the exe its only 7.8mb

-Lintalist (October 05, 2019, 03:58 PM)

Could you link to that binary? Or are you building from source? The latest Windows binary setup packages for V5 alpha from https://github.com/U...nheim/tesseract/wiki are 40MB in size. The .exe can be extracted with 7zip to 200MB of files. I don't know how many of those files are redundant when only using tesseract.exe for plain simple command line image to text conversion.

Example screenshot


Tesseract OCR result (took less than a second)

[Select]

T've had pretty good results with Tesseract actually - if you're going with the English ‘fast’ library data + the exe its only 7.8mb (other libraries are bigger and slower
it seems but might produce better results). The tesseract.exe works just fine in ‘portable’ mode, no need to install it - just keep the exe + trainingdata file in the
same folder. It can be slow if you feed it large image files but for screenshots it shouldn't take longer as a few seconds in my experience.

Of course the more languages you add the larger it gets and you may wish to offer some clear instructions and options to users how to add and handle them.

214

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Feature request: automatic OCR of captured images.

« Last post by Nod5 on October 04, 2019, 05:25 PM »

There is always Tesseract
https://github.com/t...seract-ocr/tesseract
https://stackoverflow.com/a/26418458

Though I don't think there is a portable/"bundleable" Windows release of a recent Tesseract version. Only installers and they're many times the size of Clipboard Help+Spell.

215

General Software Discussion / Re: Abbyy Finereader 15 OCR Software just released

« Last post by Nod5 on September 06, 2019, 04:29 PM »

ABBYY Finereader version 15 has just been released.

-brahman (September 02, 2019, 04:47 PM)

I tested the trial a bit. Produces quite quick and accurate OCR, is my first impression.

But: I can't find a mode that comes close to Acrobat's "Editable Text and Images" (older name was "ClearScan") where the image bitmap text characters are replaced by custom vector fonts that look like the original but smoother.

Finereader 15 has an option called PreciseScan that claims to do some smoothing but I didn't see much smoothing improvement compared to when that option is off. I only did a a few quick tests though.

Samples

Acrobat vectorized setting


Finereader 15 with setting PreciseScan


brahman, do you know the ins and outs of Finereader and if so can you tell me if I've missed some Finereader 15 setting to produce vectorized output similar to the Acrobat sample above? (I know I can have Finereader replace the bitmap text with OCRed text in a different Windows font of course, but that's not what I'm after here.)

216

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for AsciiDoc editor

« Last post by Nod5 on September 03, 2019, 05:50 AM »

This whole thread started as a question, but could be seen as a reference or starting point now. For those in need, of course. And if I find new and/or better tooling for working with AsciiDoc, I'll update this thread again.

-Shades (September 01, 2019, 11:30 PM)

Thanks for documenting your experiences - useful! I hope plaintext readable document formats in general get more widely adopted.

217

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for AsciiDoc editor

« Last post by Nod5 on September 01, 2019, 04:07 PM »

I confess I hadn't heard about AsciiDoc until reading this thread.

I then read https://asciidoctor....cs/what-is-asciidoc/ which asks two questions "What is AsciiDoc? Why do we need it?" but doesn't answer the most important question: why AsciiDoc rather than the much, much more common MarkDown?

I then found https://asciidoctor....sciidoc-vs-markdown/ and while mighty sceptical when starting reading I actually came out thinking AsciiDoc has some nice features. But mark down my words: I sure won't be an early adopter.

218

Find And Run Robot / Re: displaying long file names

« Last post by Nod5 on August 07, 2019, 05:08 PM »

I can confirm that the word wrap happens, though I hadn't noticed it until you posted about it. Don't know if there is a way to disable it.

219

Living Room / Re: Recommend an online community to co-design and create devices for personal use

« Last post by Nod5 on May 15, 2019, 12:57 PM »

Something a bit like this https://www.instruct...-Pi-Doves-Repellent/ ?

Turning a light source on/off and moving small servo motors is quite easy with a Raspberry Pi. There are a lot of tutorials on that online. My advice is that you first figure out what type of sound/light/movement is sufficient to repel the birds in the location you have in mind. Once you have that more detailed you can work out what kind of hardware/software you need. Perhaps a simple PIR movement sensor is enough as a reliable detector, rather than more complex machine learning and computer vision software?

220

General Software Discussion / Re: Mozilla shoots itself in foot

« Last post by Nod5 on May 05, 2019, 02:28 PM »

https://blog.mozilla...-add-ons-in-firefox/

A Firefox release has been pushed — version 66.0.4 on Desktop and Android, and version 60.6.2 for ESR. This release repairs the certificate chain to re-enable web extensions, themes, search engines, and language packs that had been disabled (Bug 1549061). There are remaining issues that we are actively working to resolve, but we wanted to get this fix out before Monday to lessen the impact of disabled add-ons before the start of the week. More information about the remaining issues can be found by clicking on the links to the release notes above. (May 5, 13:22 EDT)

Seems like a reasonable approach. They've now had more time to test the update. The release allegedly patches (most of) the issues which should go some ways to mitigate negative impact on users who rely on Firefox on work/school weekdays.

221

General Software Discussion / Re: Mozilla shoots itself in foot

« Last post by Nod5 on May 05, 2019, 03:22 AM »

Big mess this!

Ghacks is a good site, but a bunch of people in the comments section there tend to be weirdly, toxically negative against all things Mozilla/Firefox.

Two more direct sources to monitor for news until a more permanent fix is out:
https://blog.mozilla...-add-ons-in-firefox/
https://twitter.com/mozamo

https://twitter.com/.../1124882998984204288

We are really, really sorry for the continued disruption of features that you love and trust. We know this has been frustrating, and we're committed to fixing this as fast as we possibly can.

https://twitter.com/.../1124879521750978560

Hi folks, our team has been working around the clock for the last 24 hours to get your extensions back up and running. Unfortunately, we don't have a permanent fix ready to be released.

We're going to hold off on trying to push a permanent fix tonight (Pacific time) and give our engineers a chance to breathe while our QA team runs a more complete battery of tests on the updated builds.

222

Find And Run Robot / Re: Use of Variables inside Aliases

« Last post by Nod5 on April 28, 2019, 03:35 AM »

I think I should be able to fix your problem -- sounds like it's just a matter of the order that FARR replaces variables and regex values, and that regex $$n values should be resolved first.

-mouser (April 26, 2019, 06:13 PM)

Consider adding a list with the resolving order to the helpfile after the changes. Things that might resolve in some order or other:  %uservar.myvar.hundred% variables, $$1 regex matches, the new fileresults command, the older #filecontents command.

Helpfile says that #filecontents can be used recursively (haven't tried it) so FARR already resolves at least the string "#filecontents" for that command. But does/should #filecontents and fileresults commands also resolve %uservar.myvar.hundred% and $$1 in the file contents and if yes in what order?

Hypothetical, overly complex edge case example
- User types input that triggers a FARR alias with RegEx that puts the string "file" in $$1 and "cool" in $$2
- The alias has this results line:

[Select]

fileresults C:\folder\%uservar.myvar.$$1%.txt

- with the suggested change in this thread that line would first resolve to

[Select]

fileresults C:\folder\%uservar.myvar.file%.txt

- imagine the variable %uservar.myvar.file% contains string "testingfile", we then get

[Select]

fileresults C:\folder\testingfile.txt

- imagine that file contains:

[Select]

#$$1contents C:\folder\results.txt

- which, if command fileresults resolves $$1, will resolve to the command

[Select]

#filecontents C:\folder\results.txt

- imagine that file in turn contains

[Select]

C:\here\%uservar.othervar.$$2%.txt

- which, again if command #filecontents also resolves $$1 and % variables, resolves to

[Select]

C:\here\%uservar.othervar.cool%.txt

- which, imagine, resolves to

[Select]

C:\here\final_file.txt

- which contains

Spoiler

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

223

Find And Run Robot / Re: Use of Variables inside Aliases

« Last post by Nod5 on April 27, 2019, 06:32 AM »

Just to add to mouser's suggestion:
You can use the list approach together with RegEx and RegEx result filter to ensure that only the list items are shown in results, and filtered as you type. Without RegEx unwanted files that contain the keyword string might also show up in the results.

Example of what I mean with RegEx result filter:


With the above you'd type "gg" to get the whole list and nothing else. Then keep typing to filter the list.

224

Find And Run Robot / Re: Use of Variables inside Aliases

« Last post by Nod5 on April 26, 2019, 04:29 PM »

I don't know of any workaround to do exactly what you want to do. But perhaps mouser does.

Anyway I like that you're new to FARR but already push the boundaries Aliases are powerful so maybe there is is some other way to achieve the end goal you're after. Could you tell more about the use case?

225

Post New Requests Here / Re: "IDEA" : Key to Replace Context Menu R-Clik Program Start On Selected

« Last post by Nod5 on April 23, 2019, 07:37 AM »

@4wd: I took MourningStar to want to apply the exact context menu verb on the selected files. That will sometimes be different from passing a textfile with filepaths to the target application. But if the applications they want to use this on have command line equivalents for each of the wanted verbs then your approach, if we add an extra step constructing the command line argument, is an alternative way to do it.

edit:
Doh! You already made my point. Or rather I repeated yours.

passed to the end program, (or intermediate cmd file if the program can't take text list input).

-4wd (April 23, 2019, 04:51 AM)

I suppose I'm standing on the shoulders of 4WD giants