baseunicode

One of my toy projects: https://github.com/thanatos/baseunicode ; there's probably a lot that could be done better, and the alphabet it uses needs to be greatly expanded. There are few other implementations of the same idea out there, too. Here's another one: https://github.com/qntm/base65536 ; since it uses a power-of-two sized alphabet, it avoids some of the work mine has to do around partial output bytes. That link also links to some other ideas & implementations The exact metric I cared about at the time was compressing for screen-space, not for actual byte-for-byte space. I wrote it after spending some time in a situation where doing a proper scp was just a PITA, unfortunately, but copy/pasting into a terminal is almost always a thing that works. But I was also dealing with screen/tmux, which makes scrolling difficult, so I wanted th

> 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 o