[lotharrr]

Yeah, syncthing is awesome for repeated interaction.. once you've configured the two sides to know about each other, it's really flexible for doing an initial transfer, pushing just the new changes, pushing to multiple destinations, etc.

magic-wormhole doesn't need the initial configuration, but only lets you transfer one file (or one directory). So it's better for ad-hoc transfers, or for safely establishing the configuration data you need for a more long-term tool. The analogy might be that magic-wormhole is to synthing as scp is to rsync.

The snap/flatpak thing is weird, and I share your discomfort with uncertain provenance of software delivered that way.

I wrote the original version in Python, and took advantage of a number of useful dependencies (Twisted, to begin with), but a consequence is that installing it requires a dozen other packages, plus everything that Python itself wants. I've watched multiple people express dismay when they do a `brew install magic-wormhole` and the screen fills with dependencies being downloaded. If I knew Go, or if Rust had existed when I first wrote it, I might have managed to produce a single-file executable, which would be a lot better for deployment/distribution purposes, like wormhole-william provides today.