Tools like code editors, IDEs, debuggers, and version control systems such as Git make the lives of developers so much easier, while playing a crucial role in making software development more efficient and manageable.
Such tools allow developers to focus on solving problems and building functionality without getting bogged down by menial tasks and debugging snafus.
For this App Of The Week, we will be checking out a powerful scratchpad app that has been specifically tailored for developers.
Text Pieces: A Scratchpad For Developers
Mostly a one-man show led by Gleb Smirnov, Text Pieces is a Rust-based scratchpad app that markets itself to be the Swiss knife of text processing (its logo shows that too). It is actively developed, with new releases adding useful improvements.
⭐ Key Features
As for what Text Pieces can do for you, it can carry out Base64 encoding/decoding, convert JSON to YAML, sort/reverse sort lines, and can be extended via third-party scripts and custom tools.
Some of its highlights include:
Escape/Unescape Strings
Counting Words/Symbols
Computing MD5 Checksum
💻 User Experience
On my Fedora 41-equipped laptop, Text Pieces ran without any issues, allowing me to get started right away at app launch. For my testing, I only focused on a few specific tasks, but Text Pieces offers much more than that.
First, I tried converting a JSON file into YAML by uploading a file by using the “Load File…” option from the hamburger menu and selecting the appropriate operation in the “Select action” menu.
It worked well, providing me with an appropriate output, which I could easily copy by clicking the dedicated copy button on the top-left of the app.
Text Pieces converting JSON to YAML.
Next up, I tried encoding a piece of plain text using Base64, and the process was the same as before: Add your content, choose the action, then get the result. For this, I just added an interesting story of Borfy the dog and let Test Pieces handle the rest.
As you can see below, even decoding the same piece of text worked as expected. 👇
Text Pieces encoding (center) and decoding (right) a piece of Base64 text.
Then I tried minifying a JSON file, and, no surprises here, it worked. I could also run an operation where I could count the number of lines a text had, allowing for quick overviews of long pieces of code.
Text Pieces minifying a JSON file and counting the number of lines in an entered piece of Rust code.
Concluding my testing, I found out that Text Pieces is a no-nonsense app that does exactly what it promises. It’s straightforward, efficient, and free from unnecessary distractions. If you need a reliable tool to handle text operations without extra bells and whistles (read bloat), this app delivers perfectly.
⚙️ Installing Text Pieces
You can usually find the latest release on Flathub, with the GitLab repo being the next best place to source it.
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