Sometime i want to send small messages between devices, such as a url, a note, a id, a token, a piece of code, a picture Especially send between phone and laptop.
Some chatting app have self messages such as telegram saved messages, slack (you), Microsoft team…
However i don’t want a bloated chat app that would took few hundred mb on phone, or required to install an app on my pc (linux which make many app broken). I don’t want work chat app too, because self messages can be seen and scanned by employer (yes, a security add on chatbot on slack warm me because i send something like password to myself on slack)
Something like Opera Flow would fit perfectly, but i don’t want opera browser.
Maybe kdeconnect?
I use either KDE Connect (/gnome connect), or firefox
Idk why this is so low. Kdeconnect is all about sharing information between devices, url/file even notifications. It also has remote control and ping devices.
Depending on what your are doing kde connect and/or sync thing
+1 for KDE Connect.
Especially in OPs use case of transmitting small snippets such as urls, the automatic clipboard synchronization should be very useful.
Signal. I use it anyway so it’s not an extra “bloated” app and I know all the secrets I send over the app are encrypted.
If you use a password manager, most have a notes feature that works well too.
Notes in Google Keep will sync between mobile and web
If you use a web email account, just create a draft email and don’t send it. Then log into your email account on the other device and read it there.
Try this small web app I made exactly for this https://kapus.app
I love your privacy/security summary. Thank you for your honesty!
This looks like a handy tool.
Thx! I made it for myself one evening when I needed to copy some passwords to my toy android before I managed to have cross platform password manager.
Localsend is a good one to try out. Works with all devices and is pretty fast. It does however require an app to run.
For something you can run off the web on PC you can try pairdrop. This doesn’t require an app to work on PC. Haven’t tried it without the app on mobile so not sure if it will work on there via web.
I prefer Localsend over pairdrop due to local send being completely server less and all local.
Oh man I use local send every single day, it’s phenomenal I absolutely love it. Can’t stop raving about it
SSH over Tailscale to Termux (all three free) using private-key authentication — two levels of e2ee, and fairly easy to use.
For small bits of text, I use one of these, depending on the direction and the source device:
- Laptop → phone:
xclip -o | ssh phone termux-clipboard-set - Laptop ← phone:
ssh phone termux-clipboard-get | xclip - Phone → laptop:
termux-clipboard-get | ssh laptop DISPLAY=:0 xclip - Phone ← laptop:
ssh laptop DISPLAY=:0 xclip -o | termux-clipboard-set
For larger things, or files, I use
scp. For other devices that I haven’t setup beforehand, or can’t set up (e.g. can’t run arbitrary programs), I connect to my phone’s hotspot, and use Total Commander’s Wi-Fi transfer addon for files (both of which are also free). Small strings I just copy over by eye and hope it goes well.- Laptop → phone:
Discord. I have a channel in one of my servers that’s just me.
It’s a huge failure of computing that this is the most convenient and obvious way to do this.
Yep… but if you are on iOS and Mac, copy and paste works perfectly fine and seamless. But any other combination is not good.
*If you have paid for newer gen and all of your iOS and Mac devices are compatible…
FTFY, it’s a heavy caveat that makes 80% of their equipment dead unless you give it a second life with a different operating system. I’ve got perfectly decent devices that are bricks in their current original OS unless I get real technical with it. One I can double the ram capacity in it because for some reason apple throttled it’s size but the hardware is designed for more if you just tweak it.
I wish apple was better about it and the device file transfers was just a staple thing that had since conception. Air transfer is a pain in the ass from past experience and works when it wants to, cloud syncing also works when it wants to even when telling it to update it now. I have a partner who uses apple almost exclusively, it’s so close to being something decent but I can never tell what’s actually going on with a device and there always seems to be some kind of weird hiccup in any process (like 25% of the time, still noticeable from being seamless though).
(I have frustration from this, I apologize for my rant)
Best thing I’ve used in forever.
Requires Dropbox.
Would be great if it could let you sync stuff yourself, like with Syncthing or Resilio.
I refuse to use Cloud storages.
Still this is one of the best solutions I’ve seen.
Yup. That’s my one hangup. Except you don’t even need to install Dropbox. It just uses the Dropbox API (correct me if I’m wrong please).
The developer is a single(?) person based out of Germany and is pretty chill. I didn’t know it had Ubuntu and all support till after using it for a long time. I literally would use it just for iOS to Mac and back.
Yea, just requires a Dropbox account. And unfortunately I can’t get it to authenticate.
I’ll try some more when I have time, it’s a brilliant solution.
Despite everything, Telegram is actually great. It’s only bloated if you’re using the features on the device, the client is opensource and there are native apps for any platform, it’s very lightweight compared to other messengers and even to some dedicated filesharing solutions, it sends stuff p2p on the same network so you don’t need to care about the traffic, but also it allows for on-demand downloads so if you want the stuff will be available outside of your network.
Alternatively, kdeconnect, but I find myself using Telegram instead 9 times out of 10, even though I have both installed.KDE Connect
Signal
Email
They said good, email can take up to 10min
