hello VS shite

Nitrux, or the FreeBSD derivative "Hello/System"

HelloSystem is an interesting design that is intended to be just the kind of interface you're wanting. The author is critical of modern user interface design and advocates the Macintosh interface. It's interesting stuff to consider. Hellosystem is based on FreeBSD and is not ready for users (and may eventually be a FreeBSD desktop, not a Linux distro).

Are you suggesting they should have chosen Wayland? I think they have a good argument against it:

"Wayland: Under development since a long time, it offers no clear advantage over Xorg while it makes things more complicated (e.g, breaks screen recording) --> Use Xorg instead, or (maybe even better) no X server at all but pure framebuffer (like *ELEC does for media centers). Also see https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... "

https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc...

> Custom Actions

> It is now possible to arrange custom actions in cascading submenus. Just enter the same submenu name for a custom action in order to place it into the same menu. If you require multiple menu levels, you can achieve that by using '/' in the path of the 'Submenu' entry.*

In 2012 KDE AppMenu Runner was presented as a "plugin which allows to browse, search and select the menubar of the active application".[0]

In 2019 I requested to somehow implement a feature, similar to Blender's "Menu Search"/"Operator Search"[1], into Olive Video Editor.[2]

After it "Action Search" was implemented into Olive Video Editor ('/') shortcut, its code was reused for "Action Search" in Scribus ('Ctrl+/') and then converted into Qt5-plugin.[3,4]

Year later, this Qt5-plugin code reused in for implementing global "Action Search" in helloSystem FreeBSD distribution.[5]

Then "Search and Run a Command" ('/') was added into GIMP.[6]

Guess, GIMP's implementation may be used for other GTK-based apps too (especially Inkscape, which still has no such feature).

[0] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/02/appmenu-runner-the-kde-h...

[1] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/issues/265

[2] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/controls...

[3] https://github.com/scribusproject/scribus/issues/109

[4] https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-plugin-actionSearch

[5] https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/issues/21

[6] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/5601

Pandoc can be your friend. My site maker [1] is built around it.

I think a hundred or so well-chosen lines of your favourite scripting language can do wonders. Mine is ~300 lines of Bash because I over-engineered a thing or two for kicks. The core of it is maybe 50 lines.

[1] https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite

The README documents the architecture and rationale. Maybe it will help you figure out yours. Happy hacking!

[1] https://evalapply.org

[2] https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite?tab=readme-ov-file#te...

Bookmarked! These look like amazing study projects; the kind one can copy and learn from. Quite like how they do it in art school. Each one of them looks like it solves a nontrivial problem, and edifies the reader on the basic contours/tenets of the problem/solution space.

I love this kind of stuff, because it shows one _can_ solve a pretty juicy problem with not that much code, honestly. Also because it suggests that the industrial-strength equivalent has a lot more in for use cases, corner cases, and/or optimisations that are not relevant for one's requirements (at least not yet, maybe not ever).

I aspire to write code like that. Useful, concise, but not obtuse. Some of my code is not as significant as those examples, and maybe falls short of my ideals, but it gets a lot done in well under 500 loc. e.g. my website maker in Bash [1] (hot-builds and hot-refreshes without JS), or the JS that drives text art animations for Hanukkah of Data [2].

[1] https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite is about 350 LoC counted this way (excluding the script containing HTML templates).

  $ grep -E -v "^$|\\s?#" bin/{events,metadata,templating,utils,hotreload}.sh | wc -l

I love the code [1]. Mine [2] is a bit over engineered because I wanted hot-reloading (without JS), and it was a delightful yak shave.

But the basic idea is the same --- heredocs for templating, using a plaintext -> html compiler (pandoc in my case), an intermediate CSV for index generation.

Very nice!

[1] https://github.com/karlb/karl.berlin/blob/master/blog.sh

[2] https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite

xdotool emulates user actions under the X Window System (e.g. typing, mouse around, click etc.).

I'm using it to send keypresses to the browser, as you rightly observe.

So if I want to just reload a page, the browser gets F5.

To GOTO some page, it gets a stream of keystrokes for the URL characters and then Enter.

It's really that simple-minded, and it works!

This case statement covers my usage: https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite/blob/master/bin/hotre...

Pandoc powers my little static site maker:

cf. https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite/blob/master/bin/templ...

  __shite_templating_compile_source_to_html() {