Glow: Markdown reader for the terminal with a TUI and encrypted cloud stash

hk__2 5 years ago |

> Glow works with the Charm Cloud to allow you to store any markdown files in your own private collection.

Why would I want to store my files on someone else’s computer rather than in a git repo on mine?

vhanda 5 years ago | |

Since you're already storing your notes in Git, I think GitJournal [0] might be useful for you. It's an open source mobile first markdown based notes app integrated with Git. (I'm the author)

[0] https://GitJournal.io

douglaswlance 5 years ago | | |

Thanks for sharing that. Just downloaded it. I've been planning on building a similar app.

The killer feature I need is a share target so I could select a snippet of text, hit share, and paste it into a particular note.

vhanda 5 years ago | | |

This already works in Android. Or do you mean in iOS? Either way, would you mind opening on a bug on GitHub - I'll be happy to implement it.

jadbox 5 years ago | | |

Please make a browser client with the same interface! :)

vhanda 5 years ago | | |

On it. But not this month. The underlying technology's web support is still in beta (Flutter).

Also, sadly GitHub and GitLab only have all/none access to private repos. OAuth access to specific repos isn't a thing. So Desktop support is more important for me.

Also, here is another similar project - https://github.com/taniarascia/takenote

vector_spaces 5 years ago | | |

Any plans to distribute via f-droid?

https://f-droid.org/

vhanda 5 years ago | | |

Yup - https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal/issues/29

The two main blockers are moving away from Firebase analytics (not open source) and setting up an alternative payment method.

It's something I want to get done by the end of the month [0]

[0] https://gitjournal.io/blog/2020-10-01-sept-update/

bdcravens 5 years ago | |

Probably the same reasons you may prefer Google Drive over Microsoft Office.

That said, I would definitely prefer pointing Glow to any standard git repo. This gives it all the security Charm is claiming to offer, versioning, etc, essentially for free. (Obviously that defeats the purpose of Glow being a marketing tool for Charm)

tobypadilla 5 years ago | | |

For what it's worth, you don't need to use the Charm Cloud features. If you run `glow` in a directory, it will recursively search subdirectories for markdown files and display them for viewing in the TUI. Stashing will encrypt them then push them to the Charm Cloud though.

t0astbread 5 years ago | | |

This is by no means a feature request but it could be useful if Glow provided a way to configure alternative stashing methods (i.e. "stash via Charm or stash via some shell script you give me"). There would still be a lot of pull towards Charm but users who wanna do it themselves can also use the stash feature.

jws 5 years ago | |

- You might switch between several computers throughout the day.

- You might believe the cloud folks do better backups than you.

3np 5 years ago | | |

Sure, but having been burnt by Keybase and others in the past, there's no way I'm adding another closed-source single-provide blackbox server endpoint to my daily routine.

While this looks like a really neat utility, I'll pass until there's a self-hosted option under a free license.

To each their own.

tobypadilla 5 years ago | | |

As one of the Charm co-founders, I think that's fair! That being said, others have asked us about this recently as well. I'll paste a reply I made the other day on Reddit:

Your concerns are well founded! I've certainly been burned by services disappearing...

It's a compromise to have a business model that allows us to develop Charm full-time vs. being completely open source. Our plan is to have a business model similar to GitHub: free and low cost services for individuals with enterprise hosting options (colo or hosted by us).

One thing that I think we should do is allow for a very easy export of all of your data. We can build that into glow and charm (vs. having to email us and ask for it or some other draconian option).

This is very much a 1.0 release of the Charm Cloud and one of the reasons we wanted to ship it early was to get feedback from the community and build out the features our users want. Your point is a great one that we should solve for ASAP. A glow export feature that spits out a .tar.gz of all your stashed markdowns seems like a great idea.

We're also open sourcing the libraries we use to build glow and charm, most of which don't require the Charm Cloud. We just made our TUI framework Bubble Tea open source for instance:

https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

We also have a library for applying JSON stylesheets to Markdown called Glamour that is independent of the Charm Cloud (and currently in use in GitHub's cli):

https://github.com/charmbracelet/glamour

Thanks for your question, it's a problem worth addressing.

sanbor 5 years ago | | |

Please consider having an open source self-host option and a paid cloud service. Many people (and enterprises) doesn't want to spend time securing and maintaining servers. If your company disappears there is the self-host option as backup. This model seems to work well for Ghost and Gitlab.

novok 5 years ago | | |

Also bitwarden is doing something similar!

FWIW, I get the impression that they want to charge money soon. Keybase never really wanted to bother with that and the implicit SLAs that come with it? Charging money is a great way to actually guarantee it will be around for a while longer than your typical ad or VC funded 'free' service.

I feel like the major problem with E2EE cloud services is getting apps to adopt it. For example, I like bear editor, but I don't like their encryption model. I like standard notes & inkdrop's E2EE encryption models, but I don't like them as editors that much since a bunch of their energy is probably being consumed by encryption stuff. It feels like the engineers who make good UIs have a hard time doing well on the security standpoint and the ones who bother to make things secure have a hard time dealing with making good UIs.

I want something that the bear's of the world will adopt and then they don't have to think about E2EE anymore.

abnercoimbre 5 years ago | | |

I've switched to Ghost for my business precisely to support this model. And since I don't want to spend time maintaining servers, I pay them handsomely.

3np 5 years ago | | |

Thanks for following up!

Well-structured exports is certainly something that I think will make a lot of people more confident (and also a necessity if you intend to have first-class support for EU customers with any kind of individual identifiers, with GDPR and all).

I’d still put a dogfed (same as you run yourselves, possibly missing select enterprise-targeted features) FOSS self-hosted server version.

Look at Hashicorp for a great example of that this works in practice when you're targeting a techy audience!

I’m sure a lot of your potential customers are happy to pay exactly because they want someone else to take care of all the technicalities - and on the other end of the spectrum (and I’m sure you’ve thought of this already) you have the enterprises that for legal or compliance reasons simply have to own the whole stack - and there you’ll have free users providing back tutorials, documentation, bug report and the occasional PR that you’d otherwise have to do yourselves or neglect. Just food for thought :)

tobypadilla 5 years ago | | |

Thank you and sanbor for the detailed reply. I think it's really interesting. We can't promise anything now but it's definitely something we can look into. I self-host Sourcegraph and Gitea and enjoy the freedom (and can also see why someone would pay to not self-host).

kps 5 years ago | | |

- I do switch between several computers throughout the day. That's what network file systems are for.

- ‘Cloud folks’ might have more stable hardware and software, but have built themselves a deadly reputation for unreliable policies.

Conlectus 5 years ago | | |

I think I'm having flashbacks :P https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

3np 5 years ago | | |

This definitely goes both ways. I’d wager GP falls in the same category as I do in that Dropbox is not an option for them. Their security track record isn’t really stellar.

fiddlerwoaroof 5 years ago | | |

Encrypting the data before uploading to Dropbox should make their security almost irrelevant? The issue I have with these anti-cloud sentiments is that they more or less give a moat to the established players like OneDrive or Google Drive or Dropbox. There has to be a better way to reduce the risk of alternative cloud services.

woodruffw 5 years ago | | |

I'm sympathetic to the idea that a company is going to be better at doing backups and maintenance than I am, but for the first point: it sounds like they're using the local machine's SSH key to wrap a symmetric key[1]. Unless you're sharing the same SSH key across all of your machines, this tool probably isn't very useful when switching between computers.

Edit: It looks like they generate their own SSH key instead of using an already present one[2]. So you'd presumably need to copy that to each machine that you'd want to use so that it can unwrap the real (cloud-stored) decryption key.

[1]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/charm#how-it-works

[2]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/charm/blob/master/keygen/ke...

tobypadilla 5 years ago | | |

Hi! I'm one of the Charm co-founders.

We actually issue a new Charm specific SSH key for you. We then allow you to link machines together with our `charm` account utility. The symmetric keys used to encrypt data are encrypted for each public key linked to your account so you can access your data from multiple machines.

woodruffw 5 years ago | | |

Thanks for the explanation! Glad to hear you've thought out and handled the linking process.

Just out of curiosity: have you seen or considered age[1] for the symmetric pair? I've used it on a few projects where cryptographic flexibility wasn't necessary.

[1]: https://github.com/FiloSottile/age

tobypadilla 5 years ago | | |

We actually ended up making our own encryption library that's based on age, it's called sasquatch (built by our team member muesli):

https://github.com/muesli/sasquatch

slightwinder 5 years ago | | |

Also valid for git. Sync to github or whatever and you have the same secure cloud. Which would an editors point to automate this BTW.

3np 5 years ago | | |

Major difference here is that GH (in terms of git repo hosting and interaction) have API-compatible free and open implementations - there’s no vendor lock-in (apart from the network effect if you count that, which I don’t)

phenax 5 years ago | |

I agree. The whole "encyrpted stash" and "cloud" thing is totally unnecessary. It is an amazing tool without all that noise.

buf 5 years ago |

I prefer to do this directly in vim with Goyo: https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

stiff 5 years ago | |

Vim can't highlight Markdown correctly because it does highlighting via regexps. For correct parsing and thus for correct highlighting of Markdown you need a real parser. See e.g. this:

https://github.com/tpope/vim-markdown/issues/4

auxym 5 years ago | | |

Is this limitation of most general code editors? Has neovim fixed this?

mfontani 5 years ago | | |

Neovim has an experimental language parser which is still in its early days, but might just help:

https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter

Specifically, for Markdown: https://github.com/ikatyang/tree-sitter-markdown

BlackLotus89 5 years ago | | |

Neovim will have treesitter in the next major release, so yes probably.

Jestar342 5 years ago | |

Yup, same. Excellent plugin.

leephillips 5 years ago |

If you have Pandoc installed, you can get just the rendering/reading with something like

      pandoc -i file.md | w3m -T text/html

RMPR 5 years ago | |

And couple it with entr to emulate live preview

carterschonwald 5 years ago | |

pandoc is great :)

lou1306 5 years ago |

Somewhat related: there is a Pandoc "writer" on GitHub that pretty prints most formats supported by Pandoc (including Markdown, of course).

https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/pandoc-terminal-writer

I contributed some changes back in 2019. The writer is written in Lua and the lead maintainer seems happy to welcome PRs.

kps 5 years ago | |

Thanks for pointing that out. (I've been using `pandoc -t html | elinks -dump -stdin` in my ~/.lessfilter)

dangoljames 5 years ago |

I've done something similar but as a python flask app that uses a web browser as a reading/writing platform, that keeps it's (unencrypted) stash in a local directory (it's a 'localhost only' webservice).

It's functional but crude so nothing on github just yet ;)

charles_f 5 years ago | |

Hehe, since we're on the topic of shameless plugs, I have one in typescript - it's ready and I'm using it extensively. Serves locally as you described by using --serve

https://www.npmjs.com/package/plaf

camgunz 5 years ago |

The Charm project looks awesome, almost get a feel for “post web apps” there. Interesting.

koheripbal 5 years ago |

On windows I use Typora. Since I use markdown lists as a journal and project notes, I'm usually doing it on windows.

zepto 5 years ago |

Very nice tool. One issue is that the color scheme doesn’t work well with a white background, or a monochrome display.

mueslix 5 years ago | |

One of the authors here: it should actually automatically detect your background color and adjust its theme to it. Alternatively you can pick a different style with `-s`, or even write your own one!

zepto 5 years ago | | |

-s light works for me

Is there a way to set a default?

lbj 5 years ago |

Absolutely love this, very well done!

ashton314 5 years ago |

This is way fancier than my project, which renders markdown (or anything pandoc can read) as a man page:

https://github.com/ashton314/marked-man

JdeBP 5 years ago | |

Note that you can actually get colour and proper italics and boldface out of groff (specifically grotty). They are actually in there in the vanilla tool, but are disabled by overrides on several operating systems.

* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html

teilo 5 years ago |

Love this. Instant install.

phenax 5 years ago |

I love using glow as a markdown previewer for my file manager lf. But what the hell is up with everything else they are trying to do. Just be a good markdown viewer!

minerjoe 5 years ago |

Looks great! Love CLI/TUI.

That said, can someone please post a summary of what charm.sh is about? I don't use javascript and nothing comes up on the page.

0xdeadb00f 5 years ago | |

In disabled JavaScript and I can read the page fine.

colesantiago 5 years ago | |

turn on javascript?

minerjoe 5 years ago | | |

I don't use a browser with javascript. I cannot turn it on.

colesantiago 5 years ago | | |

so what is stopping you from using a modern browser like firefox to view the site with javascript?

dpedu 5 years ago |

This is cool, but I want to run my own server.

eeZah7Ux 5 years ago |

A text file in git or syncthing does the same.

cocktailpeanuts 5 years ago |

I want this as an editor, with VIM support :)

hackerm0nkey 5 years ago | |

I've installed it and I felt the same as what you mentioned :)

Then I saw Goyo Vim plugin

suprfnk 5 years ago | |

What does this do that Vim doesn't, for you?

cocktailpeanuts 5 years ago | | |

This doesn’t seem to let me edit, for starters.

D2187645 5 years ago | | |

Its backed up to the cloud out of the box.

RMPR 5 years ago | | |

There's no Cloud it's just someone else's computer

johnghanks 5 years ago |

why