Show HN: Aft, minimalistic file transferring program

Show HN: Aft, minimalistic file transferring program(github.com)

27 points by dd-dreams 2 years ago | 12 comments

Hello HN! I have been working on this program for some time, and I wanted to show it off to you.

Would love to get some feedback.

thatxliner 2 years ago |

There’s already the excellent [croc](https://github.com/schollz/croc) which I’ve gotten all my friends to install and use.

dd-dreams 2 years ago | |

It sure looks excellent, `aft` actually looks very similar to it with the same relay server idea. I don't know the program, but from a first glance, it looks like it requires a relay server. While I don't think it has any major disadvantages, but needing to communicate with an external service might not be reasonable for some people. And many times you might not require a relay server at all such as transferring on a local network, or from a VPS (maybe croc can identify if its on a local network, didn't dig enough into it). Well, you can host yourself a relay server, but it does require a bit more configuration.

Also, some people might like Rust more than Go ;)

deciduously 2 years ago | | |

> Also, some people might like Rust more than Go ;)

Why would this matter for users?

bomewish 2 years ago |

there's also magic wormhole which seems to do something very similar? https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

dd-dreams 2 years ago | |

Thanks for the comment. Yes, it also does something very similar. But, Magic Wormhole requires "Mailbox Server", to deliver messages from one to another, which seems a requirement, where in aft it doesn't. It also requires both clients to be on the same "Mailbox Server" to transit messages between them. Requiring a server by default doesn't seems reasonable only to omit IP addresses.

Each program has it's unique benefits, Magic Wormhole looks great, but I do believe that aft gives you more configuration by default, and its more accessible to you.

Also, some people like Rust more than Python ;)

Edit: typo

sneak 2 years ago |

Feedback: having to specify addresses and ports is a drag. I suggest looking at how magic wormhole does it; nobody wants to look up and type in IP addresses.

The user probably shouldn’t need to think about whether it’s in p2p mode or not.

dd-dreams 2 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback. Only an address is needed to be specified. There is a default port built into the source code. But, I believe in the near future I will add some kind of algorithm to extract IP addresses from phrases.

> The user probably shouldn’t need to think about whether it’s in p2p mode or not.

aft designs to be configurable, but I do believe your comment is right and something about it in the docs should be added. There is also a config file in this program, with a default `mode` property. It's not really used right now, but very soon it will be.

sneak 2 years ago | | |

I never want to have to configure a file transfer program. For this to be useful to me, it has to be better than magic wormhole.

worldsavior 2 years ago |

What's the difference between it and sftp?

dd-dreams 2 years ago | |

Please see https://github.com/dd-dreams/aft#comparisons