About a year ago I wrote a post on formatting strings.

The basic idea is to improve the text formatting workflow. This workflow usually looks like:

Copy text, this could be json, sql…
Open formatting tool, IDE, web browser…
Paste text
Click button
Copy output

Doing this over time is very time consuming. Also, the formatting tool might be sluggish.

A simplified workflow would be:

Copy text
Click button. This triggers some bash commands which take text from clipboard, format it, and place it back on top of clipboard list. Job done!

Benefits: less steps, less tools, offline tool.

New clipboard manager

At some point in the last year I updated my machine and replaced GNOME with KDE. I took the occasion to update the clipboard manager to CopyQ. Somehow I prefer the cli of this clipboard and also has a nice gui.

Updating scripts

Formatting json

copyq copy "$(copyq clipboard | jq .)"

Formatting sql

copyq copy "$(copyq clipboard | sqlfmt - --single-process -q)"

Sorting string

This is a new addition

copyq copy "$(sort <(copyq clipboard))"