A programmable scratchpad
Notepad Plus

© Lead Image © IKO, Fotolia.com
Boop, a digital scratchpad, lets you convert data from your desktop instead of exposing confidential data online. You can even extend Boop with your own functions using JavaScript.
If you need to count words or lines of text, calculate checksums and hashes, optimize program code, or perform any other conversion function, you can easily find an online source to do just that. However, you may not want to copy and paste confidential data to a potentially dubious website.
Instead, Boop [1], a digital notepad that can be scripted, performs this task locally. The open source program originally developed for macOS supports typing or pasting text via clipboard. At the touch of a button, a variety of predefined scripts or even your own small programs can then be applied to the entered text. This means that all the data stays on your computer, and you can save yourself the trouble of searching for the right utility online.
With the release of Boop-GTK [2], a port to the GTK toolkit, Linux and Windows users can now use Boop. The still very young application is not currently listed in the package sources of the major Linux distributions, with the exception of a boop-gtk entry in the Arch User Repository (AUR) for Arch Linux. Users of other distributions need to build the program from the source code or use the Snap [3] or Flathub packages [4] provided by the project.
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