Purpose of this code

This project is something I created because I wanted to open links on my host windows machine web browser from an ssh session in putty. A friend (Darcy) suggested a node server et voilà, ForTheWindows was born. It's a node.js server that accepts requests (from curl in my case) and performs an action in windows. Currently I have url opening working (with firefox) and sending text to the windows clipboard.

The project has two main parts right now: the server and the shell tools. I use curl to send requests to the node.js server but I want it to be easy to call the functions from bash and to pipe to them, ideally. "As few dependencies as possible" and "easy to set up" are a couple guiding principals. This project is supposed to make workflow easier; if you must spend hours making things work it's a failure right out of the gate.

urlopen

Send a URL to windows to be opened in a new browse (Firefox) tab

clip

Send text to the windows clipboard. Relies on clip.exe (bundled with windows since Vista; you can download it for XP) and python on the client (for urlencoding).

Roadmap/Wishlist

• paste
  There is no paste.exe to go with clip.exe! Leave it to MSFT, right? :p I found [this article on the subject] 1 which provides some c# code. When I've the time to get that up and running I'll include a paste.exe binary
• file copying
  I'd like to be able to FTCopy /path/to/my/file and have it copied to my windows machine. Some security (quarantining, virus scanning (?) removing executable permissions etc) would be good here.
• security and/or whitelisting
  Obviously opening URLs, copying to the clipboard, moving files and especially accessing the clipboard from a remote machine presents security concerns. I plan on incorporating a IP whitelist, then (ideally) implementing a "knock knock" command that could be run on the client to request access, which could be granted for the session on the server.
• Vim integration There is a plugin called fakeclip that looks like it would work well for this. I plan to set a config variable in vimrc to tell it to not use system specific functions for read/write but FTWin. I would like to get paste working first.
• Modularize functions Make each JS function its own file that autoloads, so everything is an extension. Possibly do this for the bash side as well.