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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

sqlite is opaque? I've got this script to list my open tabs, and a few more scripts for other Firefox actions.

  $ grep FIREFOX ~/.bashrc
  export FIREFOX_DIR=$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/q3m93qpe.default-release/

  $ cat ~/.local/bin/ff-tabs
  #!/bin/bash
  lz4jsoncat $FIREFOX_DIR/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4 | jq -r '.windows[].tabs[].entries[-1] | .title, .url, ""'

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Ha! Of course I would choose an example based on JSON, not sqlite, but the point still stands. Sqlite is one of my favorite file formats, it presents the data in an interface far easier to manipulate for a one-off CLI command than writing another Python script with open() and dozens of re.sub().

JSON is also not very opaque. What's opaque is iOS with its locked down storage per app as you mentioned.

Some OS builders have been trying to push this model on the desktop but have not been very successful due to legacy. It only seems to be done with mobile apps running on the desktop (Windows with Android apps and macOS with iOS)

I also lament this model, I think we should always have full access to our devices. But there's a strong commercial push for lock-in and subscription models.

How do you use it?

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