I often find myself needing to share text from a device to another, like a link from my phone to my laptop for instance. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I had a simple webpage where I could just paste text from a device, so that it could be read from another? Some sort of LAN clipboard, if you will.
I could use Nextcloud notes as a medium, but that requires me to login, and it would be a pain to log out and login every time I need to just share some text on a shared/untrusted target devices. So it’s important that this hypothetical webpage does not require authentication.
That’s where flatnotes comes in. It can easily be installed with Docker compose, and authentication can be disabled by setting the FLATNOTES_AUTH_TYPE environment variable to none.
Last but not least, I want to restrict the service to LAN only. If you use Caddy, that can be done quite easily thanks to snippets. I covered this exact use case here.
And that’s it! Easily accessible text content from and to any device on LAN with a web browser. Here’s what it looks like:
Note that the images are quite cropped in, hence the strange looking proportions.
This is the home page where recent notes are displayed.
And this is what the inside of a note looks like from a handheld.