Show HN: Edky, a CLI to convert Ed25519 public keys from one encoding to another

A new little command-line app called Edky has arrived with a very specific mission: take one kind of digital key and flip it between the many weird text styles different apps insist on using. On paper, that sounds deeply niche. In the comments, though, it hit a painfully familiar nerve: why does every tool save the same key in a different costume? That quiet frustration is the real story here.

The strongest reaction came from developer raphinou, who basically delivered the classic coder confession: I picked one format, supported another, and now I may have to revisit all my choices. It’s not a screaming flame war, but it has that delicious low-stakes drama of someone realizing a tiny utility might upend part of their project. The mood is half relief, half “oh no, this would have been useful earlier.” That’s the hot take bubbling under the surface: simple conversion tools can expose how messy everyone’s setup already is.

There’s also a subtle comedy to the whole thing. Edky doesn’t do some flashy artificial intelligence trick or promise to change the world; it just helps translate confusing strings of letters so humans stop suffering. And that, honestly, is why people perked up. The joke writes itself: in tech, sometimes the most exciting release is the one that says, “fine, I’ll clean up everybody else’s formatting chaos.”