Title: Easy text transmission from computer to smartphone

	Title: Easy text transmission from computer to smartphone
	Author: Solène
	Date: 25 March 2021
	Tags: opensource
	Description:

	# Introduction

	Today I will share with you a simple way I found to transmit text from
	my computer to my phone. I often have to do it, to type a password,
	enter an url, copy/paste a message or whatever reasons.

	# Using QR codes

	The best way to get a text from computer to a smartphone (that I am
	aware of) is scanning a QR code using the camera. By using the command
	qrencode (I already wrote about this one), xclip and feh (a picture
	viewer), it is possible to generate QR code on the fly on the screen.

	Is it as simple as running the following command, from a menu or a key
	binding:

	```shell script
	xclip -o \| qrencode -o - -t PNG \| feh -g 600x600 -Z -
	```

	Using this command, xclip will gives the clipboard to qrencode which
	will create a PNG file on stdout and then feh will display it on a 600
	by 600 window, no temporary file involved here.

	Once the picture is displayed on the screen, you can use a scanner
	program on your phone to gather the content, I found "QR & Barcode
	Scanner" to be really light, fast and usable with its history,
	available on F-Droid.

	QR & Barcode Scanner on F-Droid

	Composing a quite long text on your computer and sharing it to the
	phone can be done with sending the text to xclip and then generate the
	QR code.

	# Going further

	When it comes to sharing data between my phone and my computer, I love
	"primitive ftpd" which is a SFTP/FTP server for Android, it works out
	of the box and allow secure transfers over Wifi (use SFTP please!).

	primitive ftpd on F-Droid

	For simple transfers, I use "Share to Computer" that will share a file
	or a group of files as a zip on a temporary http server, it is then
	easy to connect to it to save the file.

	Share to Computer on F-Droid

	For sending SMS through my phone but from my computer, I use the
	program KDE Connect (it has to be installed on phone and computer), I
	wanted to write about it for a long time but it's not easy to explain
	how to get it to work and uneasy to explain its usage. But it allows me
	to receive phone notifications on my computer and also send SMS. I have
	simple aliases in my shell like "mom-sms hello are you ?" to ease my
	use of SMS. When possible, don't use SMS, it's not secure. The program
	does a lot more than sending SMS, like using the smartphone as a remote
	touchpad as one example.

	KDE Connect on F-Droid