gist: So long as I am eating crow. …

I might as well go ahead and get a second helping of humility. After royally fumbling klick, I need a second smack in the head to acknowledge my error with gist.

Yes, I’m afraid I can’t just pretend I didn’t flub this one too.

My mistake was confusing this for another pastebin-style uploader, and discounting it on the grounds that the other one required an account signup. Sorry. After 1100 posts and ~1500 software titles, it gets hard to keep track. I should have a list or an index online somewhere. … 🙄

The real tragedy is, when compared to other pastebin tools I’ve seen in the past two years — like elmer or uppity or some others — gist is one of the better ones.

Some of gist’s cooler functions that I’ve noticed: automatic URL shortening through git.io, direct hookups with both xclip and xsel, updating existing gists with just the address hash, and one-time account authorization with the --login flag. Nifty.

One thing I’ve seen other tools do that I don’t see offhand in gist: Access to several different hosts. But I suppose that’s the nature of the tool, and what’s available through Github Gist.

At this point, with the landscape of pastebin tools largely dependent on what site they can access, I imagine the choice of tools might shift to what services the target site offers. For that reason it might make sense that gist wins fans among programmers.

Just from the upload page you see in the screenshot, you can fork an uploaded snippet, watch revisions and clone it off the page. I can see the appeal among coders; someone’s random list of words quickly becomes the next killer app.

So hopefully now I’ve done my penance for both klick and gist, and made up for one mistake and one misunderstanding. 😐

wgetpaste: A healthy collection of features

I have a link to the home page for wgetpaste, but it gives me nothing but a 404. Perhaps it has moved.

 

Ordinarily I’d look to the Debian repositories for a backup source package, but it’s not in Debian. So this time, Arch saves the day. 😉

wgetpaste uploads text to pastebin-ish services, much like curlpaste or elmer or others. Judging by the -S flag, wgetpaste supports about five or six upload hosts, but I’ll be honest and admit I didn’t try all of them.

As far as code languages, you have your choice of about 180 that wgetpaste claims to support — and no, I didn’t check all of those either. Some of them I never even heard of. 😯

But as you can see, a quick default run through wgetpaste sent my test file out into the wild blue yonder, and it arrived safely and intact at bpaste.net, the default host.

There are a couple of other options worth mentioning. wgetpaste can use tee to show you what it’s sending out. It can also interface with the X clipboard, like uppity does. And it has an option to send a URL to tinyurl.com, kind of like surl does.

So I suppose, if you wanted some of the functions of other tools, or features of other text-paste tools, wgetpaste might be a good choice.

uppity: Not the last, nor the least, pastebin-ish upload tool

Just by virtue of alphabetical order, uppity is arriving near the end of a long list of pastebin-ish upload tools.

I’ll try to give it the same measure of attention that its competitors received, even if I am beginning to wonder why there are so many of these tools, and if there is a requirement somewhere for CS majors to write a program to upload a code snippet to the Internet.

uppity, in conjunction with dpaste.com, worked fine for me, and I was able to apply a description to the short text file I uploaded. uppity supports quite a few different services, and there’s always the chance that it will fall out of favor with one or more of them. But uppity cleared the first hurdle — do what you promise — without incident.

kmandla@kl-mkc96: ~/temp$ head output.txt
001,Fanny Moreno,902 Kennel Ln,Indianapolis,IN,46206,(317) 901-6298,77,7299714f
002,Geraldine Adams,479 Flanty Terr,Burlington,NC,27215,(919) 114-2613,67,4f77e31d
003,Mario Meyer,482 Shalton Dr,Auburn,NY,13021,(315) 918-2187,77,8ffaf55c
004,Clare Flynn,676 Dorwin Rd,Addison,IL,60101,(708) 811-9115,41,1fc9ade7
005,Refugio Mcfadden,603 Plymth Terr,Akron,OH,44309,(216) 277-6958,56,0027b74b
006,Chance Mcclure,279 West Street Terr,Akron,OH,44309,(216) 759-8910,69,d17459d3
007,Wilma House,854 Burnet Dr,Appleton,WI,54911,(414) 872-1644,56,f21e179c
008,Charity Newman,770 Rider Blvd,Detroit,MI,48233,(313) 167-2599,47,fb3f7ce2
009,Chester Ross,337 Genesse Blvd,Seattle,WA,98109,(206) 987-2809,85,22cfce3c
010,Preston Higgins,729 Limetree Ln,Orange,NJ,07051,(201) 377-8402,61,cfa29694

kmandla@kl-mkc96: ~/temp$ uppity -s dpaste.com -d "Sample address database." output.txt
Uploading output.txt: 100%
http://dpaste.com/1GJ7FD5

The variety of features available between services is probably what accounts for some of uppity’s options; there are specific flags for language (code language, not spoken language 😉 ), expiration, description and nickname, to name the majority. It will also mash together separate files into one whopping upload, if you ask nicely.

uppity also makes a point of listing the languages supported for each service with the -L flag, so if you’re looking for one that will enhance a specific block of code, that might be useful to you.

And I also see, but didn’t test, features specific to a graphical environment, to including reading from the X clipboard and writing to X’s primary selection buffer, both of which need xclip installed to make use of.

The beauty in that, as I see it, is uploading your code snippet, then immediately pasting the link from the selection buffer, without the added step of opening a browser or highlighting the displayed text.

I like uppity for doing the job and having the forethought to add a few time-saving shortcuts. As it is, I rarely need a pastebin-ish service, but when the time comes I’ll make a point of hunting down uppity again, and giving it the chance to impress again.

pastebinit: As in “pastebin it!”

I keep reading pastebinit as pasteb-init, as if it was some sort of newfangled startup script spawned by systemd or something.

That, of course, is way off the mark, since pastebinit — as in “pastebin it!” is another cli-driven pastebin uploader.

pastebinit is not the only such tool available, since we’ve seen haste, curlpaste, elmer and quite a few others in the past year.

The usefulness of pastebinit or any of the others is more or less dependent on the pastebin you want to use. If pastebinit doesn’t mesh with your bin of choice … well, I guess that makes pastebin clients a little bit like instant messengers.

pastebinit handles quite a few different target sites though, not the least of which is the one you see above.

Double-check which ones your version handles; there are quite a few in the current Arch version:

- cxg.de
- fpaste.org
- lpaste.net
- p.defau.lt
- paste.debian.net
- paste.drizzle.org
- paste.kde.org
- paste.openstack.org
- paste.pound-python.org
- paste.ubuntu.com
- paste.ubuntu.org.cn
- paste2.org
- pastebin.com
- pastebin.mate-desktop.org
- pb.daviey.com
- slexy.org
- sprunge.us

I like pastebinit, but I don’t find it particularly easier or more convenient to use than any of the others. And given that I only rarely use pastebins, this might not be the killer app for me. 😕

haste: Pipe and paste with haste

I’ve mentioned pastebin-type tools more than once in recent history, and they all have strong points depending on the site they target.

I like haste partly because hastebin.com is open to public use (see fb-client :roll:), but also because it seems to work smoothly.

 

Left, the action. Right, the result.

Ideally, you could just pipe all three together, but hastebin.com in elinks doesn’t show much. 😉

That’s about all there is to it. haste is a bit delicate though; there’s no man page that I could find, and it doesn’t seem to accept flags. If I threw a curve ball at it, it would freak and spatter errors on the screen.

The stable version seemed more or less … stable for me though. The git version wasn’t cooperating. But of course, that could change in days, so. … 😐