Support sharing text directly

[hyphenrf]

I can receive text and links from kdeconnect android, but I can't find a dialogue that'll let me go the other way. Is that planned to be implemented?

[hyphenrf]

turns out I was on an old revision (nixos, 70ef1aa)

[hyphenrf]

I upgraded to the newest revision on master and confirmed that this request stands

[hyphenrf]

I found a new share dialogue, it was outside of the device view

[andyholmes]

Could you give me context for this? I'm interested in understanding the limitations.

Trying to export an arbitrary amount of actions for device is problematic for a usable UI. An example in GSConnect is #1640 , where the extension has to, but can't manage the amount of actions and items presented.

Also if there are protocol docs somewhere I wanna check them out 🙏

The JSON RPC documentation is available at https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-meta/-/blob/master/protocol.md, although Valent maintains its own at https://valent.andyholmes.ca/documentation/protocol.html which are tested against.

Also also, what ui mockup/preview tool do you use if any?

If I need a mock-up tool I just use Workbench, although I usually just do it by hand in GNOME Builder when developing.

Maybe a user could type directly into it then have the option to open a larger dialogue when needed:

I'd be more inclined to add a third row that opens a dedicated page with a large entry. I'm less worried about the small entry, than trying to differentiate a potential URI from arbitrary text (e.g. www.gnome.org vs 1.0.alpha).

Something I'm less excited about it is relying on the behaviour of the remote device. Putting something into a file vs the clipboard could have quite different outcomes, maybe undesirable ones.

I haven't heard much feedback about this feature, so I don't know how/what it's being used for. @albertvaka, do you have any thoughts on the share/text behaviour? Should it be well-defined, or maybe just defined as "device may choose...".

[albertvaka]

There's some overlap between sharing text and clipboard sync. This is how we handle shared text it in the KDE desktop client:

• Copy the text to the clipboard and display a notification.
• The notification has an action to open the text in the default text editor.
• If the text contains only a link, the notification has a button to open the link.

I think is the best we can do, but for example in Android we don't do all this handling... so we are not consistent.

[hyphenrf]

it it because in android there's no notion of "default text editor"?

[albertvaka]

Yes, but we could still show a list of files to open with, or at least give the option to save as a file or something else. We just copy to the clipboard.

[andyholmes]

Hmm, a notification might be a better option for Valent, too. That's probably a decent expectation for behaviour, just that the receiving device will notify the user.