[HN Gopher] Ppl: The command line address book
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       Ppl: The command line address book
        
       Author : nomoreplease
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2021-06-08 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | adamj9431 wrote:
       | Great idea. I would definitely use this if it could talk to an
       | LDAP server
        
       | jeroenhd wrote:
       | This is an interesting idea. The way the commands look like
       | filesystems makes me wonder how hard it would be to make a FUSE
       | filesystem for contacts based on this premise.
       | 
       | One "mount -t contactsfs contacts ~/contacts" and you could
       | literally treat your contacts as files!
       | 
       | What I don't like about programs like this is that they often
       | don't respect the XDG folder configuration, resorting to
       | ~/.pplconfig and ./.ppl/config for default configuration paths.
       | I've already went through all the stupid dotfiles in my home
       | directory once, moving as many as I could, and I'm not going
       | through all that effort again.
        
         | KMnO4 wrote:
         | Apart from a neat toy project, what benefit would "contactfs"
         | have over just storing text files in ~/contacts?
        
           | tomcooks wrote:
           | People could share identities as files, have public keys and
           | contact infos, or maybe even content? Would that count as
           | distributed social network? It would work really well with
           | mobile
        
       | lwhsiao wrote:
       | I've been looking for something like this. Are there other
       | similar tools in this space?
        
         | wfleming wrote:
         | Another comment already mentioned Khard, which has been around
         | a while. [0]
         | 
         | There's also Mates [1]. Less mature, very simple, but it's what
         | I personally use.
         | 
         | I try to steer away from relying on CLI tools implemented in
         | python or ruby: at the system level they always seem to cause
         | dependency hell problems eventually. Mates is implemented in
         | Rust, so it's compiled, which is primarily why I chose it.
         | 
         | An important related project is vdirsyncer [2]. Ppl, khard, and
         | mates all store data in vcard format but don't talk to APIs or
         | sync anything. Vdirsyncer can sync your vcard collection with
         | your email provider or what have you.
         | 
         | [0] https://github.com/scheibler/khard
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/pimutils/mates.rs
         | 
         | [2] https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer
        
         | swalladge wrote:
         | I've been using abook [1], which is very old software but is
         | fast, simple, stores data in plain text, and can export to
         | vcard when needed.
         | 
         | [1]: https://abook.sourceforge.io/
        
       | sasvari wrote:
       | there is also khard [0]
       | 
       | [0] https://github.com/scheibler/khard
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-08 23:00 UTC)