social-print

I love composing text in txt and md files but copying and pasting such text into web forms is frustrating because I use so many new lines in the file that shouldn't be respected when copying text into a web form.

This repository contains the code for social-print, a command line interface (cli) for rendering your text stored in txt files so that you can copy and paste it into the post form on social media sites. The executable built by this repo is sprint.

Building

There will at some future point be a distributable build of this tool but for now one has to build it to use it.

• Install ghcup
• clone this repo to your favorite projects directory
• cd your-awesome-project-dir/social-print
• stack install

If the installation goes as planned inspect the message for the location of the executable sprint. For me it is ~/.local/bin which I happened to have already added to my $PATH. Either append the install location to PATH or use it fully qualified path.

Note: If you get a command not found error see comments in Building Section of this README

Usage

Microblogging

The platforms x and bsky are built for short posts. If your idea is longer than the character limit of the platform you want to post on you want want to chunk the string into numbered functions. social-print takes your long string and converts it to a sequence of chunks each of which is under the character limit of your desired platform. Each resulting post will include an index like 3/10.

Take your idea and put it into a file or type it straight into your terminal. Then invoke sprint {platform-name} like

sprint bsky "How now brown cow?"

You can also forward text from a file like

sprint x "$(cat docs/hello.txt)"

For example, the string

hello there! how are you? This is an example of a tweet (or whatever they are called now) that
is longer than two hundred and eighty characters in length. Such a string would not be able to
be a single tweet (maybe they are called posts now), but would have to be split up into chunks.
It's pretty easy to split up strings by hand as well as number them by hand, but for me it still
takes more concentration than feels worth the cost. Why not let our computer friends (who love strings by the way!)
take care of it for us? I think it sounds reasonable.

Will be rendered as

hello there! how are you? This is an example of a tweet (or whatever they are called now)
that is longer than two hundred and eighty characters in length. Such a string would not be able t
o be a single tweet (maybe they are called posts now), but would have to be split up 1/3

into chunks. It's pretty easy to split up strings by hand as well as number them by hand,
but for me it still takes more concentration than feels worth the cost. Why not let our computer friends
(who love strings by the way!) take care of it for us? I think it sounds 2/3

reasonable. 3/3

which you can copy and past into your desired platform.

Assumptions

• all words in the input string are less than 250 characters in length (250 < 280 to leave buffer room)