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.
Syncthing.
QR code reader and generator on both phone and laptop
- Phone: SecScanQR
- Laptop: ZBarCam and Zint
But I’m glad to have learned about LocalSend here so I’m no longer limited to short text snippets
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.
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.
This is the poor man’s tech work-around and can indeed confirm it works lol. You are limited by your services upload size though so beware, you might find yourself having to do multiples and then it’s just starting to get inconvenient.
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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)
I use the note to self capability of my XMPP server to send a message to myself for these sort of one-offs. I would never want my data in the hands of some proprietary service if I have the option—sharing data just to yourself on these services also means it is Big Tech’s data now too. All of the XMPP clients are super lightweight.
Bigger cases, I will use scp, rsync, or magic wormhole. Or just using removeable storage.
I use either KDE Connect (/gnome connect), or firefox
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.
+1 for Signal. It’s already on my phone, and already on my PC and laptop. It is a simple Flatpak install on Linux. It’s end-to-end encrypted. I use that for one-off notes and files between my phone and my PC or between my laptop and PC.
For notes and small files that I know I’ll want to save to reference at another time, I put them in my KeePassXC database.
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.
Indeed, if you’re just using devices on the same network, it just shares your clipboard. So if you copy something on one device, paste is available on the other. It’s pretty sweet.
I use Beeper to aggregate messaging from various platforms and for easy availability of text messages on my PC. It has a specific “Note to self” section that I’ve found useful for messaging myself.
At its core, Beeper is just a Matrix client with some pre-packaged bridges for common services (including SMS, MMS, RCS messages). You could probably do the same thing with an Element client.
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.
A similar alternative to Pairdrop with a chat UI: https://drop.lol/
It’s also worth mentioning that localsend has specific Linux support, so the app should run fine. I use it on my Linux laptop all the time!
Local send works well for me between android and iDevices in most cases. I will say it struggles with VPN’ed connections, which is by design of the network and some VPN will block local connections.
I know sharedrop.io uses a similar web based model as pairdrop and runs into the same VPN issue, but I’m curious if the room function might overcome that in pairdrop.
I’ve been working with this issue for along time. Trying to find something platform agnostic and works with vpns.
App wise, I suggest Localsend for files
Information wise, I suggest Saladroom although there are several alternatives as well like ToffeeShare and ShareDrop
I mostly use Signal though, as it’s the simplest at hand app which fairly reliably makes it accessible to my various devices… With the downside of storing it.
I just send an email to myself. sounds like it’s something you wouldn’t be allowed to do but you can
I usually just use an email draft for cross platform transfers. MacOS/iOS handle this pretty much automatically and Linux has a good option (KDE Connect) but it sounds like you’re on Windows.
Does Phone Link (built into Windows) work for your needs? I don’t use Windows often but I know they’re trying to make something sort of like the other OS’s syncing systems. Not sure how good it is.
Last I checked, KDE Connect can be installed on Windows as well. It’s not locked into the KDE ecosystem or even Linux.
