accesskit VS workflows

If you were to implement this yourself, i'd look into either swash or cosmic-text for the text rendering stack (this is one of the things you really don't want to write from the ground up). For accessibility, AccessKit has quickly become the standard for communicating with crossplatform accessibility APIs in rust GUI. lightningcss (or its lower level counterpart cssparser) are both decent options for CSS parsing. Taffy handles some of what browsers offer for a layout engine, but is still being worked on.

> Fleet relies on the Java AWT/Swing framework to get a window from an operating system, but it doesn’t use the Java platform for managing its GUI components besides one JFrame and JPanel on top of it.

This is a terrible decision that is going to bite them in the long run. Doing things this way makes it far, far more difficult to implement accessibility, and regulations on this are only going to get stricter.

Implementing accessibility for a framework like that would involve three separate implementations for three separate platforms and the need to interface with D-Bus, COM and Objective C, from Java. I imagine that the latter two would be particularly difficult, considering how bad Java's FFI support is. It's not just calling methods either, you'd actually need to implement your own classes that conform to the relevant COM interfaces / Objective C protocols. There are libraries that can help with this[1], but I don't think they would work particularly well for something as complex as a code editor.

[1] https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

fltk-accesskit is an accesskit integration crate for fltk-rs, the gui crate. It's implemented as an external crate to allow for more experimentation before stabilizing the api, especially since fltk is at version 1.4.

Libraries for a lot of this stuff exist (albeit in many cases not very mature yet):

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text does text layout (which Taffy explicitly considers out of scope)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit does accessibility

- https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser does value-agnostic CSS parsing (it will parse the general syntax but leaves value parsing up to the user, meaning you can easily add support for whatever properties you what). Libraries like https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss implement parsing for the standard css properties.

- There are crates like https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr and https://docs.rs/wtf8/latest/wtf8/ for working with non-unicode text

We are planning to add a C API to Taffy, but tbh I feel like C is not very good for this kind of modularised approach. You really want to be able to expose complex APIs with enforced type safety and this isn't possible with C.

There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:

- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)

- https://github.com/vizia/vizia

- https://github.com/marc2332/freya

- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)

What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:

- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)

- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)

- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)

- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)

In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)

Using HarfBuzz makes sense. But if you're looking for a pure-Rust alternative, I hear cosmic-text (made by Pop!_OS) is good. There's also AccessKit for accessibility.

There are efforts to support a cross platform accessibility library:

https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

egui is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI for Rust, and I just released 0.20. It's a big release!

There is now support for AccessKit (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit) which brings accessibility to egui (a first for an immediate mode GUI?).

There is also better table support, nicer keyboard shortcut handling, better looking text in light mode (still not great, but better).

See more in the changelog: https://github.com/emilk/egui/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Try it out at www.egui.rs

Hi HN,

I’m Aloke, one of the co-creators of commands.dev (https://www.commands.dev/) and an engineer at Warp (https://www.warp.dev/).

Commands.dev is a curated, open-source collection of popular terminal commands that lets you quickly search for hard-to-remember terminal commands by title, tag, and description. Each of these pages are also indexed by Google to provide a consistent, well-formatted alternative to the variety of sources these commands turn up now, like StackOverflow.

As an engineer who uses the terminal frequently, I often have trouble remembering the exact command I want to execute if it’s not easily searchable within my terminal. Some commands that I run infrequently don’t match up with the underlying task they perform, which makes it even harder to find. For example, to undo my last git commit, I have to search for “git reset”, which I never remember because I’m always thinking “undo”ing my last commit instead of “reset”ing.

We built commands.dev so that there would be a centralized place to quickly find and search commands based on their name, description, or category. If you are a Warp user, these commands are also integrated directly into Warp as a feature we call Workflows (https://docs.warp.dev/features/workflows) so that you can quickly search and execute them directly from the terminal.

These commands are open-source (https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows) and we would love contributions to make commands.dev even more useful. So far, we’ve already had 85 commands created by 22 unique contributors.

I’m excited to hear what you think of commands.dev! Our team sincerely hopes this will become a go-to tool on the Internet to consult when developers need to remember a difficult command, either directly on the site or by discovering a commands.dev page when searching Google for help with a command.

If you’re interested, join Warp’s Discord (www.warp.dev/discord) and follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/warpdotdev).

It's a good question, one that we are discussing a bunch.

We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client codebase. The server portion of Warp will remain closed-source for now.

You can see how we’re thinking about open source here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400 TLDR;

As a side note, we are open sourcing our extension points as we go. The community has already been contributing new themes [https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes]. And we’ve just opened a repository for the community to contribute common useful commands. [https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows]