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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
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