i made this program during the height of the 2020 covid lockdowns. it was years before i joined or believed in the promise of mastodon and i and everyone else was in an intense and particular place emotionally. i loved this project, and i used it so so much. it spawned a sweet small internet posting platform and was my first sort of participation in the diy internet. in any case, it's done now and it's frozen in time. it still works well, and i think there's an interesting utility to frozen programs. this is one, please use it for anything you'd like, attribution not even necessary

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Thoughts 💭

Thoughts is a POSIX-compliant shell program for making short text posts and putting them on the internet. Thoughts has a terminal interface and runs on UNIX-based systems like MacOS, Linux, the BSDs, and WSL.

Thoughts keeps your thoughts in a single HTML file, and it syncs that file in a remote git repository. That HTML file is your thoughts page. It's up to you to serve the file from somewhere, but Thoughts handles everything else.

Thoughts can be installed on any number of computers, all updating the same remote HTML file.

Thoughts supports deployment on Codeberg Pages or GitHub Pages out of the box. Simply enable pages on your personal Thoughts repository.

If you want a thoughts page but don't want to host it yourself, you can do that at https://thoughts.page. Note: I don't run thoughts.page but I do endorse it

Thoughts' only dependency is Git, and it should run without modification on any UNIX-based system.

How it works

1. Install Thoughts
2. Type thoughts in a terminal and press ENTER
3. Your preferred text editor opens. Type your thought, then save and exit
4. Thoughts adds your thought to index.html
5. Thoughts pushes your updated index.html to a remote git repository

Installing

Install thoughts with the install.sh script described below

First install:

(Do this if you're making a new thoughts page)

1. Install and configure git
2. git clone https://git.bunk.computer/maren/thoughts.git ~/thoughts-source && cd ~/thoughts-source
3. Install with ./install.sh
4. Add $HOME/.local/bin to your PATH
5. Use git init to create a git repository in $HOME/.local/share/thoughts, then point it at an empty remote origin
6. Be sure the repo is set up properly:

   $ cd ~/.local/share/thoughts
   $ git add .
   $ git commit -m "init"
   $ git push
   

7. From anywhere in your home directory, type thoughts

Installing on another computer:

(Do this if you already have a thoughts page)

1. Clone https://git.bunk.computer/maren/thoughts.git and cd into the cloned directory
2. Install with ./install.sh another
3. Follow the prompts

Commands

• $ thoughts edit
  • Edit your previously posted thoughts
• $ thoughts style
  • Customize the default CSS
• $ thoughts preview
  • Preview a thought in a browser while working on it

"Markdown"

Thoughts supports non-standard markdown that's mostly just HTML.

• Italics
  • You can write <em>italics</em>
• Bold
  • You can write in <strong>bold</strong>
• Inline code
  • You can write <code>inline code</code>
• Code blocks

  • <block>
    You can write code blocks with this fake tag I invented.
    Each <block> tag must be on its own line or it won't parse correctly.
    Exactly like this.
    </block>
    

• Links
  • Links are automatically linkified if they start with http:// or https://, and the "h" has a space in front of it
    • Thoughts will also linkify gemini and gopher links
• HTML
  • Arbitrary HTML is theoretically supported outside of code blocks, but there are likely to be some inexplicable side-effects.

Notes

• When typing a thought, newlines are converted to <br> in all cases.
  • Thoughts' goal is to make what you typed in vim appear on the internet, and to make it look roughly the way it did in vim. So, there will only be space between lines if you put it there -- space things how you want!
• Thoughts is wrapping lots of git behavior.
  • The edit and style commands don't only open HTML and CSS files for you; they also wrap git things so that your changes stay synced across all your computers.
  • If a git thing is breaking, manually inspect the situation in $HOME/.local/share/thoughts.
• If you post a thought that contains HTML outside of a <block> tag, that HTML will definitely render in the browser. It might work, or it might break. Experiment!
• You can modify the footer by editing the file at ~/.local/share/thoughts/.foot.html