Franco Pasut Blog

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Previous article: brief comparison between robocopy and rsync 3. Slow rsync with WebDAV 4. Installing Rclone on Linux: repository or official website? 5. Configuring Rclone 1. Introduction Robocopy: The "Robust File Copy" is a built-in powerhouse for Windows users. It’s the native way to handle massive local transfers or network shares (SMB) while perfectly preserving NTFS permissions. Rsync: The de facto standard for the Unix world (Linux and macOS). It’s famous for its efficiency—instead of re-copying everything, it only syncs the specific parts of a file that have changed. Rclone: Think of Rclone as "Rsync for the Cloud." While the tools above were born for physical disks and local servers, Rclone was built for the API era. It is a true multi-platform "Swiss Army knife" that runs seamlessly on Windows, Linux, macOS, and even FreeBSD. What sets it apart is its incredible versatility: it ...

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. What is the "Super" Key? 3. What is the Taskbar? 4. The Core Concept: Super + Number 5. To Pin or Not to Pin? That is the Question. 6. More Than Just Windows: The "Super + Number" Shortcut on Linux 7. Beyond the OS: Browsers and Outlook 8. The Bottom Line 1. Introduction In modern desktop environments, from Windows to mainstream GNU/Linux distributions, Alt+Tab remains the go-to shortcut for window switching. While seamless for light multitasking, this method hits a wall as your workflow grows. Once you have dozens of active windows, what was once a quick "flip" becomes a tedious cycle of repetitive keystrokes. Even Alt+Esc fails to address the root of the problem, as it still forces you to manually scan through an endless stack of applications to find the one you need. There is, however, a faster and more surgical approach: the Super + Number combination. In this article, I will e...

Table of Contents 1. Does it still make sense to perform operations via the command line? 2. How do you open a command terminal? 3. The “cd” command. 4. The “ls” and “dir” commands. 5. The “cp” command. 6. The “rm” command. 7. In conclusion. 1. Does it still make sense to perform operations via the command line? Talking about the command line in today's operating systems might seem a bit vintage, as if the topic were a historical remnant of the first personal computers of the 1980s. In reality, even today, the command line is an extraordinarily efficient resource, despite the most modern graphical interfaces. MS-DOS was my first operating system back when “windows” had not yet been invented. To write this article, I recovered from my paper library an old book published in 1989 dedicated to MS-DOS, in which I found my underlinings from that time. Graphical systems have made everything easier but not faster . The advantage of text commands over thei...

Table of Contents 1. Copy and Paste: the universal method. 2. A short introduction to the Command Line in MS Windows. 3. Two integrated command-line solutions: xcopy and robocopy. 4. Basic scheme and some options, among many, of the robocopy command. 5. Robocopy and batch procedures. 6. Robocopy and Rsync. 7. FreeFileSync 1. Copy and Paste: the universal method. To transfer files from one folder to another folder we usually use “copy and paste.” The “universal method” is “copy and paste”: we all know how it works and it is certainly simple and straightforward. But is it also the most efficient method? If there were some documents already previously transferred and others to be transferred, it would be necessary to manually select those to be transferred before doing the “copy and paste,” and this operation could be particularly time-consuming. In cases like these, more efficient solutions should be sought. These solutions exist but are somewhat hidden...

ABSTRACT Article on how to copy a list of files in a folder and paste the list into an open document. The operation is performed only with resources internal to the tested operating systems, which are MS Windows, GNU/Linux (Arch, Fedora and Ubuntu) and macOS, although in the last one, only in command-line mode. 1. Topic of this article. 2. Command line solution in MS Windows. 3. Command-line solution in GNU/Linux and macOS. 4. Graphical solution in Windows with File Explorer. 5. Graphical solution in Linux with File Manager. 1. Topic of this article. Have you ever had a folder on your computer full of files and need to insert the list of those files in a page you are editing? It happens to me often for file lists to be inserted at the end of court documents. In this article, I describe a couple of solutions that I have personally tried, in the MS Windows environment and in various UNIX -derived operating systems, i.e., some GNU/Linux distributions, particul...

Make Emacs totally portable under Windows Table of Contents 1. Emacs for Windows is natively portable, but not too much 2. A basic solution: create a batch file inside the bin folder 3. Second part of the solution: launch system valid for any drive letter associated with the key 4. It's not over: we can also create a Documents folder valid for all drive letters 5. 32bit version for all computers Figure 1: Emacs + USB Pendrive = Emacs Portable 1 Emacs for Windows is natively portable, but not too much Emacs needs no introduction , it is simply a work of art in computer engineering. Although native to the Unix world, Emacs is also available in Windows version and is already distributed in portable mode, ie without the need for the typical installation within the operating system. However, the portability of Emacs for Windows is limited, in the absence of specific configuration, to the basic version. As soon as you try to customize th...