Ask HN: How do you make the browser your own user enviroment? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you make the browser your own user enviroment?

2 pointsmastrsushi17 comments

Everytime I want to do something simple like convert a string to caps or split a gif into images, I have to visit some shady site. Is there a free or open-source way for all these "basic" functionalities to work on the browser? As a user environment where I can download packages and visual apps to run locally?

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> As a user environment where I can download packages and visual apps to run locally?

It's almost like the computer needs the ability to run applications separate from the browser, to achieve tasks that are unrelated... What an idea that would be!

However some of the tasks you mention are very trivial. It seems hard to believe that you think a dedicated "app" is required for example your first example "convert a string to caps". This can be solved several ways on macOS out of the box.

TextEdit: New Document, (paste content), select all, Edit > Transformations > Make Upper Case

Terminal: pbpaste | tr 'a-z' 'A-Z' | pbcopy

Edit: oh and I forgot to mention, Preview.app (also built in) will open a gif as a series of image frames, so you can do as you wish with them.

Nice snide remarks, except you forgot, browsers run on phones.

I’m so sorry I completely overlooked that.

Maybe one day we’ll be able to install apps on phones too!

Continuing to avoid the subject of the thread. excellent argument!

So your solution seems to be Unix tools on the desktop and cluttering your smartphone with 1000 apps. Both sets of software being incompatible with each other platform. Yeah, not quite what I was looking for.

Well iOS apps run on Arm Macs.

Even before that, there were Catalyst based apps.

So, yes.

> You know the whole reason I brought up the browser.

No I really don't.

> So your solution seems to be Unix tools on the desktop and cluttering your smartphone with 1000 apps.

Nice editing of the previous comment to have completely different content.

I gave you two different suggestions: unix tools, that will work anywhere you can get a POSIX shell; or an example of what the built-in GUI tools can do on one platform.

>Well iOS apps run on Arm Macs

I forgot everyone owns and is willing to own a Mac.

>No I really don't.

Oh, I'm aware you don't.

> I forgot everyone owns and is willing to own a Mac.

You didn't specify a platform, you just asked if something is possible in the future. I said its possible now.

If your chosen platform vendor doesn't want to support that use-case, that's their and your issue, not mine.

>You didn't specify a platform

The browser is a platform. A big fact you seem to be missing.

If you say so. The existence of this thread seems to indicate it's either a very poor excuse for a "platform" or you're using a very loose definition of "platform".

>Using a thread on a programming forum as evidence of a platforms relevance or definition.

Again, great argument.

This is hard to answer, because you could get good advice from two opposing directions:

- learn to use the command-line more, relying on documentation like http://cht.sh/magick, and http://cht.sh/python/uppercase

- learn to maintain graphical tools, like pqiv and AutoHotKey. I think this is the harder of the two

If I want to convert a string to all caps inside of the browser, I can push F12 and then use the JavaScript console (it is also useful for doing simple calculations, and more; really, the web developer console is a feature I use a lot, despite not doing web development stuff). If I want to do so outside of the browser (I don't want to do everything in the browser; the outside stuff is often better), I can use the tr command.

If I want to deal with pictures, I always use external programs, such as ImageMagick or my own Farbfeld Utilities (although Farbfeld Utilities cannot currently read animations, so ImageMagick must be used instead).

It is possible to download web pages to run them locally, if there is some function you want to do on a web page which is less shady. I don't know which web pages are designed to do that, but you can write some if you want to.

So you want UNIX utilities in the web? Really?

Honestly it sounds like a fun project idea: make a page that can do random little manipulations on text for you in JavaScript. But really you'd probably be better off just bringing up a terminal and running some imagemagick commands or echo "turn this into caps" | dd conv=ucase

This goes beyond Unix utilities. If everything that's not performance concerned can run in the web, I want to use the browser as an application layer. This goes for phone and desktop.

Well that’s what chrome apps were... These are being discontinued, though. Not sure what they are going to be replaced with.

But basically ChromeOs is what you describe...

Also observablehq.com is a collection of community-created javascript notebooks that run locally. You may be able to find all you need there...

I wrote a file sharing utility that works in the browser. If I want increased personal automation I put it into that tool. For something like convert a string to all caps open the browser developer tools and simply:

    myString.toUppercase()

I can't figure out the name or URL of it, but there is a really delightful in-browser HTML/JavaScript string toolbox out there on GitHub. I think it was developed at a U.S. Government agency, IIRC...

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