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here I may post some short, text-only notes, mostly about programming. source code.

tags: all (19), scripting (5), bash (4), linux (3), html (2), markdown (2), obsidian (2), shortcuts (2), ActivityPub (1), advent-of-code (1) ............ see all (+15)

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turning my clipboard into a blockquote on Linux # source

tags: scripting, linux, markdown • 237 'words', 71 secs @ 200wpm

I like markdown. I use Obsidian a lot, and write a lot in GitHub issues. Something useful I usually do is quote other people's words, so in markdown it would look like:

The Met office said

> it will definitely snow tonight
>
> like... 100%

I found that I can use a command xclip to get/set my clipboard on Linux, and I use a lot of sed to do word replacement, so I realised I could copy the text

it will definitely snow tonight

like... 100%

and then run this command in my terminal (xclip gets/sets the clipboard, sed replaces ^ (the start of each line) with > )

xclip -selection c -o | sed "s/^/> /" | xclip -selection c

which would get my clipboard, replace the start of each line with a quote, and set the clipboard, setting the clipboard to:

it will definitely snow tonight

like... 100%

I've set aliases for these commands so I can use them quickly in my terminal as:

alias getclip='xclip -selection c -o'
alias setclip='xclip -selection c'
alias quote='getclip | sed "s/^/> /" | setclip'

but also I created a keyboard shortcut in Gnome, CTRL + SUPER + Q, which will quote my clipboard. I had to set the shortcut to run bash -c 'xclip -selection c -o | sed "s/^/> /" | xclip -selection c' as I don't think pipes sit well in shortcuts.

But now I can really easily...

quooooooooote

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