I’ve recently decided that it’s time to properly make the leap from Windows to Linux - whilst I’ve had a lot of experience with Debian I was underwhelmed with the experience of trying to get Wayland and Niri working nicely and unconvinced about its ability to keep up with NVIDIA graphics drivers. I also needed the best option for gaming as a heavy Steam user so there was a distro that came up on my radar called CachyOS, but it was Arch! Was I ready to take on the tinkerers’ favourite? Well actually yes, the installer for CachyOS made the whole process of installing the OS to its own partition pretty painless - as long as I remember to sudo pacman -Syu once in a while I’ve actually had a pretty smooth ride.
Anyway, on with the point of this post. Now that I’m moving my work environment to CachyOS across a couple of machines, I often find myself faffing about emailing terminal commands or random lines to add to another machine as I’m configuring things. Wormhole and croc seemed to be pretty close to what I needed but actually I’d still need a simple way to get a key or reference to the remote machine. What I really needed was an very simple means to sync a register across my machines. Syncthing was so close but I needed a little bit of fish magic to make it a nice simple experience not dissimilar to the nvim register. I originally thought a single file would do the job but ran into some issues with conflicts so I decided it’d be just as easy to save each register to a file.
So the main outcome I wanted was a simple command to allow me to send a title and optional body into a register, sync that across a few machines and, when necessary, list or recall the indexes on either machine. With a little help from my old mate ChatGPT I put together a script that did just that - the repo is public on github. It was very simple to set up Syncthing to handle the syncing across a few machines and now I have a really easy way to cat, echo or otherwise things into what is essentially a shared register. Feel free to check out the project and give it a try.