Announcing Sticklyst - leveraging KDE Frameworks on the Web

Sticklyst is a web paste tool, like pastebin, Stick Notes (paste.kde.org), build with Cutelyst and KDE Frameworks.

Building this kind of tool has been on my TODO list for a long time, but never really put some effort into it. When the idea first came by, I decided to look at the code of http://paste.scsys.co.uk/ which is powered by a Perl Catalyst application, to my surprise the Perl module that handled syntax highlighting was a port of the code of Kate, and it even said it used Kate's definitions.

If that code used Kate's, I'd better use the code directly, I hoped it wouldn't be too coupled with GUI classes, but failed to find the code. A week ago I saw a mention about this on KDE's mailing list, so with a little help from some IRC fellows I met the https://cgit.kde.org/syntax-highlighting.git/ code.

Then thanks to some tips from Volker Krause who showed me how to use it without GUI widgets, I managed to build a simple web app, which I presented live on the first Qt conference here in Brazil at São Paulo https://br.qtcon.org/.

Just for record the application uses less than 3MB of RAM and renders quickly using a sqlite db for the storage.

The code is 90% completed, is on production at https://paste.cutelyst.org/, and is now up for adoption. Basically someone willing to take care of it could implement the following missing features compared to Stick Notes:

  • Extra database support
  • URL shortener
  • User authentication

The list is short and the code is clean, go test, break, hack:

https://github.com/cutelyst/sticklyst

Have fun!