Show HN: Lists.sh – A Microblog for Lists | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Lists.sh – A Microblog for Lists

lists.sh

271 pointsqudat58 comments

Greetings, creator here!

I've been working on a new blogging platform specifically for lists on and off for a few months now and I'm excited to officially announce its launch.

After seeing https://charm.sh a few months ago, I've been enamored by the idea of SSH apps. I decided that a blogging platform focused on developers could be the perfect use case for an SSH app.

Also, I love writing lists. I think restricting writing to a set of lists can really help improve clarity in thought. The goal of this blogging platform is to make it simple to use the tools you love to write and publish lists. There is no installation, signup is as easy as SSH'ing into our CMS, and publishing content is as easy as copying files to our server.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

source: https://github.com/neurosnap/lists.sh

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This is fantastic! Your bash-fu is strong, you bring great honor to our dojo.

This is so cool I dare say I am feeling inspired!

This is super awesome and congrats on the launch!

I've dabbled with Go in the past, but I've been wanting to build with it some more.

How was your experience building this with Go? Do you like it?

I thought golang was great to build this product with. Besides using the fantastic charm tool chain, the std library was was able take me across the finish line. The code is relatively small and digestible and building a couple self contained binaries is a fantastic DX.

Awesome! Will definitely use your project as reference!

Congrats @qudat! Small note/typo: on https://lists.sh/spec , the link in the "The source code for our parser can be found here." sentence leads to a 404 page.

Cheers

Hey thanks for checking lists.sh out! I've fixed the link.

The SSH interface is very cool. This feels very at home in the tildeverse.

How did you approach writing an SSH backed app? Were there other apps you drew inspiration (design or technical) from? I’m intrigued by this!

My main source of inspiration was https://charm.sh

They built an incredible demo `ssh git.charm.sh` and it had my mind spinning with the possibilities.

I noticed they had an `scp` example (https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish/tree/main/scp) that I ended up repurposing for lists.sh.

I think SSH apps have a ton of potential for people that live in the terminal so I couldn’t wait to try the tech out.

https://lists.sh/voldide1789

This one takes the cake.

:chefskiss:

I’d read a whole book of erratically formatted one-liners like Second Try haha

I'm pretty sure that isn't what he had in mind lol!!

Your repo seems to be unlicensed. If it is not intended, can you add a license file to the repo?

Hey thanks for pointing this out. I've added an MIT license to the project.

Took me a couple of minutes to figure out why it was failing silently for me - I have ssh aliased to `kitty +kitten ssh`[0], which is obviously incompatible with charm.sh powered ssh apps. :) Works fine with unaliased ssh, of course. Great stuff OP.

[0] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/ssh/

I love lists too!! I think I'll try and get this set up. Never done SSH before. Telnet and FTP sure, but not SSH. Could adding the ability to create a public checklist be a feature request? That way I could create a list of goals, or things to check off over time. Also numbered lists, this would help with the goals, and habit checklists. That might be too many feature suggestions for right now lol.

I love anything about ssh btw there is a typo "Create lists using your favorite editor in plan text files." plain

Thanks! I’ve fixed the typo and deployed.

Don't fix the typo, just add support for .plan-files ;)

https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger

Nice work! Awesome to see something built of charm.sh libraries - love what those folks are doing.

Would be nice to have a way to have `checklists` too, I found this recently which looks cool: https://github.com/atolye15/checklist

Hey thanks! How do you envision checklists would work?

I'm curious, is this built with Charm or just inspired by it?

Hey! I built the SSH app using charm tech:

- https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish

- https://github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss

Learning the specification is a bit of a downer. Any reason why you don't allow markdown?

Thanks for the feedback! I thought about using markdown but ultimately I felt like it didn't lend itself to making lists easy to write. There are also a lot of different flavors of markdown and a ton of features that I didn't want to immediately think about supporting or removing from an off-the-shelf parser / renderer.

Creating a simple spec was easy to write, easy to implement, and I can cater it specifically to parsing and rendering lists.

I am thinking about creating a more traditional blog platform with markdown support using the same SSH app techniques. Is that something that would interest you?

Nice. I'ma Python guy myself, but I been impressed by Charm since I first saw it, and have been waiting to see what sort of nifty things people might start building with it. Thanks much for sharing.

I wonder if this would be popular with people who used "The List App" or li.st (BJ Novak's startup)

I never heard of it before, I’ll do some reading. Thanks for taking a look!

This might run counter to the super minimal setup, and feel free to ignore if so, but mathjax/katex support would be nice. I often have simple ideas that can be summarised in a couple of lines of math that could really benefit from a light platform like this.

But... scp is deprecated, isn't it?

Sort of...? The protocol is, but I guess the command is not. Sounds like people are working on a new version of scp. More: https://lwn.net/Articles/835962/

It seems on its way out. Originally I wanted to use rsync but felt like `scp` was a simpler command to work with and retool for my needs.

Hi @qudat, first of all, this is an awesome work! I've tried ssh and scp successfully, but my blog is still empty. Would you mind checking it? Really appreciate it, thank you!

https://lists.sh/mataherry

Thanks for trying it out! I’ll look into it and post back asap.

Okay so I think the reason why you have no posts is because the files were marked as invalid. Did you try uploading a `.txt` file?

neat! i'll be playing with this more tomorrow. https://lists.sh/j3s

love the idea of using ssh-as-auth for webapps. this is a fun implementation of that idea. i wish i shared your affinity for lists. :D

Would you be interested in a more traditional markdown blog platform using the same tech?

Most definitely.

This a cool use of charm.sh I wrote up some thoughts in a list: https://lists.sh/luke/thoughts

Really cool. But obviously this will leak ssh private keys and your username to lists.sh

To prevent this I guess you have specify a username and create a specific key and use that: ssh -i key unknown@lists.sh

I think you mean public key rather than private.

Correct...

Creating new keys and using those will also enable you to create multiple accounts on there.

Also, I think this service might need a reserved username list. admin, abuse, cgi or even ops, help, spec ..or ?foo=42 are all available and possible right now.

Hey thanks for the feedback. I agree and this is going to be a priority for me immediately after I triage the bug reports.

I’ve deployed your suggestions, thanks so much!

Just wait until you discover https://github.com/yourusernamehere.keys

Thanks for submitting this feedback! We only record the public key that was accepted by the SSH app, but it's true, the logs could show all the public keys attempted for authentication.

I'm also going to update the docs to suggest providing your username for the service whenever logging in, in an effort to avoid leaking your host username unintentionally.

Nice. A few suggestions:

* support markdown format in a reduced functionality * use rsync to publish

I like that it has rss feeds.

nice! how would I deploy without docker?

According the name I expected mere shall scripts.

Are there any known limitations?

Characters per line, number of items in the list?

There are no limitations to characters per line or number of items in a list. I might have to revise that later if I start noticing abuse.

added to my rss. Really nice and the idea of limiting your writing to lists helps to focus your thoughts. Will give it a try

nice! I was thinking on list social network, maybe I can dm you the idea, I would be interested to hear what you think.

Feel free to send me an email at: chat [at] erock.io

apparently your username cannot start with the letter 'q'. lol...

Looking into this

I fixed this issue. Thanks again for submitting this issue.

Nice work!

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