Show HN: Textile – A desktop app for weaving together bits of text

Hi all,

I'm excited to show off Textile, a desktop app I recently built.

Textile can combine bits of text using various inputs, such as commands on your computer, the contents of your clipboard, and hard-coded strings that you provide. It lets you carefully build up and modify a dynamic string, step by step, until it's exactly how you need it. The saved steps can then be executed on demand, with the click of a button or using a keyboard shortcut.

I built Textile because I was often constructing complicated, dynamic URLs from various sources that all existed on my computer. I got tired of manually switching between different apps, copying and pasting various chunks of text, and assembling them all together somewhere. I've also found Textile to be quite useful as a kind of repository for obscure bits of static text, such as ½ and other fraction characters, when I can't be bothered to remember their built-in keyboard combinations.

I also built Textile because I wanted to learn Electron, although I expect there will be some gnashing of teeth about this here. :) I think desktop development is quite interesting, in part because it doesn't require me, the developer, to pay for an API server and database in the cloud. The app itself is both the UI and the "server," and the local drive is effectively the "database." I knows this trades away syncing with the cloud but, on the other hand, there's something nice about knowing that your files are on your drive and not on somebody else's server.

I realize that something like Textile may already exist, and may have much more functionality but, again, I wanted to learn. I must say that multi-sequence keyboard shortcuts are hard, and there are cases that don't work right in Textile. I feel vulnerable admitting that my approach has much room for improvement!

For what it's worth, I did not use an LLM to write any code for Textile (although I did ask many questions of an LLM, as an alternative to Googling).

Textile is open source, free to use, and does not require sign up, email, phone, or other such barriers. Try it and let me know what you think!

(Note: I don't have access to hardware running Windows or Linux, so Textile is only available for macOS at the moment.)

Show HN: Textile – A desktop app for weaving together bits of text
gettextile.app

Same on Android, duck browser

This looks really cool and right up my alley. Congratulations on showing it to people. Will check it out!

I’m a little confused what this does. Is it like espanso?

I'm not too familiar with Espanso, but Textile is not a text expander. Textile allows you to pre-define a sequence of steps that dynamically generate the text you want, by running commands on your computer, reading your clipboard, or using hard-coded text you provide.

Here's a quick example, and one that I often use with Textile to generate a preview URL based on my current branch:

(1) Start with the output of the command `git branch --show-current` in the `~/code` directory (yielding text like `JIRA-1234/some-feature`).

(2) Replace all `/` characters with `-` (now the text is `JIRA-1234-some-feature`).

(3) Prepend `[preview](https://staging-`, which is the start of a markdown link (now the text is `[preview](https://staging-JIRA-1234-some-feature`).

(4) Append `.example.com)`, which is the end of the markdown link (now the text is `[preview](https://staging-JIRA-1234-some-feature.example.com)`).

(5) Copy the result to my clipboard.

With those steps saved in Textile, I can now click a button to run them over and over again (or use a keyboard shortcut if I assigned one). So no matter which branch I'm on, I'll always get a proper preview link without having to construct it manually myself.