Superuser batch downloading

By André A. Gomes

Ever felt frustrated when repeatedly clicking on individual download links from web interfaces? Galleries of pictures from cloud storage services might come to mind. Today we'll be walking you through an illustrative scenario of batch downloading, where Nyxt proves to scale to your needs!

Say you invite a friend to your place and you want to share some books. More generally, think about exchanging data among machines in the same network.

This is easily achieved by starting an HTTP server. Please keep in mind that this protocol has no security layer, so don't use it to share any private information. Simply populate a folder with the desired contents and issue python -m http.server from there.

Those contents are now available to you, from a web browser, at http://localhost:8000/.

Your friend can access it too at http://YOUR-IP:8000/, so they will be asking for your IP. You can find it with ifconfig.

If this can be achieved with any browser, why are we telling you about it? Nyxt shines in the way you can easily select all of the files you wish to download. In most browsers you'd have to move your mouse around and issue the download one by one. By the time your friend did this, say 10 times (if they really like you), they had already lost interest in the things you wanted to share.

But not when you have Nyxt's prompt buffer at your disposal, which allows you to fuzzy filter, narrow or select multiple items interactively. Your friend may say you have really bad taste, and be very picky about what they're going to download!

The command that does the magic is download-hint-url. Notice that the functionality depicted below is as general as you can imagine. Indeed, it can be used in the aforementioned cloud service example, or any other use case requiring batch downloading links.

We have to be honest and say that Nyxt's download manager still needs some fine-tuning. It might happen that it will try to download those hundreds of files at the same time and fail, since you're requesting it all from the server at once! Nyxt should handle a download queue for queries than come from the same domain. Perhaps you could give us a hand with that, if it starts to itch you.

We hope you'll keep sharing interesting things with your friends, and hopefully taking advantage of this feature from Nyxt.