Hacker News Reader

Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

Is this project still going? I used to use it a lot for duplicating my project directories between my lap PC and my home PC. It was so powerful and so useful at the time. Honestly I thought it had died.

I use Syncthing now. It's really useful.

View on HN

I recently switched from Syncthing to Unison, after getting tired of Syncthing either taking forever to sync anything or getting stuck altogether, with very little visibility or control over what it was doing. So far Unison (with fsmonitor) has ‘just worked’, with files updating immediately on save as I’d expect.

(That said, one of the problems I encountered with Syncthing seemed to be that it wouldn’t properly reconnect when I switched networks, which is necessary since it runs as a persistent daemon. With Unison, so far I’ve been starting it up in the foreground in a terminal as needed, so it hasn’t had to provide the same functionality. But I expect I’ll eventually set up some type of auto-reconnect, which will hopefully work better than Syncthing did.)

Huh, I've had the opposite experience with Syncthing. It's basically just worked, it's been bulletproof. I'm not sure why the disparity.

Similarly here. Very happy with syncthing.

Syncthing can behave oddly, sometimes it works great and others it just starts looping and doing nothing.

Of course I've not tried it in a while because of those issues so it could be fixed now.

I also have a three computer setup with syncthing (one master, two slaves), and the thing was bulletproof around the world.

When go to another country, open my laptop, connect to a wireless network and bam. Syncthing connects, things got synced automagically.

I used to use it daily to sync projects, music, and documents between computers too. It was really nice once I got it configured to my liking. I would sync my work computer to a external hard drive and the external drive to my home computer, thus creating a very powerful sneakernet and an implicit backup on the external.

I reluctantly installed Dropbox one day after forgetting my external drive at home. Honestly, that was the beginning of a miserable time. Dropbox never really delivered, it took forever to sync, and constantly caused the internal disk to trash. I had tons of other problems with Dropbox over the years and was very happy the day I quit using it.

I still have a unison alias in my .profile

    alias unison="unison -logfile /Users/eddie/log/unison.log"

I really miss the control Unison gave me.

Sorry, I'm probably missing something obvious (and am asking out of genuine curiosity here), but why didn't you go back to using Unison? And what are you using now that you quit Dropbox?

Dropbox ended up be an institutional requirement where I was working. Now I just let iCloud do it’s thing. It isn’t great, but it is less buggy than Dropbox.

Unison suffers from the Lisp Curse - it's written in OCaml, a similarly powerful but small-audience language. It "just works", so there doesn't need to be much activity.

Absolutely, I have a entry in my journal about wanting to rewrite Unison in C. Never got around to it, but it would still be fun. The same goes with Wings 3D, cool app, but Erlang? Really?

oof. I think we've gotten much different takeaways from The Lisp Curse.

Maybe, I really like Lisp and especially Scheme. Don't get me wrong. I just think that a lot of projects suffer from being written in a language with a small community or even, at the time of conception, a thriving yet fleeting community (Perl, Ruby, etc).

Unison seems to be maintained, there just isn't much to maintain. Perhaps being in C would attract a huge community to make up for the increased work required, or perhaps that wouldn't be sustainable and we're better off with projects that can better "hibernate".

Not C but not super powerful seems like the worst of both worlds.

Unison and Wings 3D are both projects I wanted to make changes to when I was using them. Downloaded the source code for both, spent a day or so reading and fiddling and got bored. I actually like learning new languages, but I don’t have the capacity to learn a new language, build system, tooling, style & formatting, install the right Emacs mode, and so on just to scratch a little itch.

The problem is that it didn't just work e.g. on Windows with filenames that contained non-Ascii chars for a long time.

I used Unison to sync between two laptops. In using only one laptop now and I switched to Syncthing to sync some folders of my phone, tablets and laptop. Unfortunately Unison doesn't run on Android. I liked the way it could perform a merge of the folders from different computers.

Can you not mount the android file system on your laptop, and sync the two different directory trees, running exclusively from the laptop?

Modern Androids only support mtp for data access, which doesn't work well for that use case.

I haven't tried unison yet, but you can mount android on your laptop wirelessly over ssh.

Enable your android phone's hotspot, and connect your laptop to that hotspot.

Install termux on android (playstore). Install openssh in termux. Setup passwordless pub/private keys to log in from laptop to android termux sshd.

  cat ~/.ssh/config # Laptop.

  Host someName # Your android.
    User u0_a168 # Whatever username termux gave you.
    HostName 192.168.43.1 # 'ifconfig' in termux for this.
    IdentityFile /home/you/.ssh/someName_id_rsa
    Port     8022 # Default termux sshd port.

Now this should work from your laptop:

  ssh someName

Log out of your laptop's termux session.

Install sshfs on your laptop, through your package manager or the manly way from github. I'm not manly.

Here's part of a script I use to get photos from my phone to my laptop.

  # Mount the phone's DCIM directory locally over ssh.
  # I had trouble with termux symlinks, so I went directly to /storage/...
  sshfs someName:/storage/emulated/0/DCIM ~/mnt/someName

  cd ~/mnt/someName/Camera

  cp -vn * ~/Pictures/. # Copy all pictures that aren't yet on laptop.

  mv * ../Saved/. # So ops on dcim/Camera don't take longer with more pics.

  cd ~/Pictures # Can't unmount until leave mount.

  fusermount -u ~/mnt/someName # Dismount. Gymnastic salute.

  # Do whatever postprocessing you like on your photos ...

https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Main_Page

https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Remote_Access

https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Internal_and_external_storage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS

man sshfs

stackoverflow

Reply on news.ycombinator.com