> This only makes sense if your metric is number of code points. Not quite! :) I wrote a similar tool I called baseunicode[1]. (Glad I'm not the only one who's

> This only makes sense if your metric is number of code points. Not quite! :) I wrote a similar tool I called baseunicode[1]. (Glad I'm not the only one who's discovered this!) The author here is using it for tweets (which oddly don't count bytes, they count code points); I wrote my version for copy/pasting data between terminals[2]: copying more than a screen's worth is a hassle, so "screen area" is the metric I'm trying to optimize, which ends up being subtly different from the article's, which is code points for a tweet. (for screen area in a terminal, some characters — CJK in particular — end up taking multiple columns; and combining code points (like acute accent) are basically free!) In my case, it ended up being easier to use base64, because it's installed by default. [2]: SCP is just a pain sometimes. If you need to read a file only privileged by root, AFAIK, it's out of luck. I'm usually going server-to-server, so I also need to remember to -3, which I inevitably forget. You can get around the root issue w/ `ssh source 'sudo cat /foo/bar' | ssh destination 'cat >foo', (or 'sudo bash -c "cat >foo" if you need root on the write…) but more work; often I find I'm already there in both terminals and I just want these bytes from this split in this other split, so I started doing `tar -cz <stuff> | base64`, copy, `base64 -d | tar -xz`, paste. And then screen size mattered, thus baseunicode. [1]: https://github.com/thanatos/baseunicode https://github.com/thanatos/baseunicode