Turn a Browser into a Scratchpad
Productivity Sauce
Transforming your browser into a scratchpad for jotting down notes is as easy as entering the data:text/html, <html contenteditable> line into the address bar and hitting Enter. There are a lot of variations of this simple trick, and you can find a few of them in a thread on Hacker News. I use a slightly modified version of Writability:
data:text/html;charset=utf-8, <title>Scribbles</title><body OnLoad='document.body.focus();' contenteditable style="font-size:21px;line-height:1.6;font-family:'Alegreya',Alegreya;max-width:21em;margin:0 auto;padding:3rem;background-color:rgb(233,233,225);color:rgb(68,68,68);" spellcheck="false">
This solution looks and behaves like a regular text editor, and it even supports basic text formatting like bold and italics. The only shortcoming of this neat hack is the fact that there is no straightforward way to save the contents. To solve this problem, you can use a simple Bash shell script that appends the current text selection to the scribbles.txt text file:
#!/bin/bashxsel -p >> ~/scribbles.txt
The script uses the xsel utility which is available in the software repositories of many mainstream Linux distributions. To install xsel on Debian or Ubuntu, run the apt-get install xsel command as root. Make the script executable using the chmod +x foo.sh command. Finally, assign a keyboard shortcut to the script. On KDE, this can be done in the Shortcuts and Gestures section of the System Settings panel. To save the contents of the scratchpad, select the entire text and press the assigned shortcut.
comments powered by Disqus
Issue 201/2017
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
GitHub Announces Open Source Friday Program
They encourage people to take time out and work on open source projects on Friday.
-
System76 Announces Their Own Distro, Pop!_OS
Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu and uses the Gnome stack.
-
Linus Torvalds Talks About His Motivation
He never tires of working on the Linux kernel.
-
Debian 9 Stretches Its Wings
The new release of Debian has a very strong focus on security.
-
Trojan Turns Raspberry Pi into a Cryptocurrency Mining Device
Two trojans in the wild are targeting Linux machines.
-
Fedora 26 Beta Comes with New Features
The workstation comes with the latest Gnome desktop environment and support for many application build systems.
-
Raspberry Pi Foundation Merges with CoderDojo Foundation
The two foundations join forces to expand their efforts to reach young people.
-
Samba Security Hole Patched but Risk is Bigger
Millions of devices that use Samba Server are vulnerable to attacks.
-
Red Hat Announces OpenShift.io
Red Hat takes its IDE online.
-
Microsoft Bakes Linux into Windows Server
Microsoft is slowly becoming a Linux vendor.