interactively VS exhibitor

I'm slightly embarrassed that in terms of building personally relevant things, my proudest (digital) work is always shell scripts I use daily. Most of my personal projects are non-technical meat-space things like building with wood and the like. Here's some that I've open-sourced:

- A git interface using fzf that works pretty nicely and is very composable. https://github.com/bigH/git-fuzzy

- An interactive evaluator, perfect for interactive `sed`, `grep`, `jq`, etc. If properly configured, it'll keep history per command or using whatever key you give it. I find myself using it often with `jq`. https://github.com/bigH/interactively

There are many other shell functions/scripts that are interesting from my `dotfiles`. Particularly interesting snippets for anyone who wants them:

- A recursize `which` that follows symlinks and stops at a real file. https://github.com/bigH/dotfiles/blob/3d48792b4e910d2fc82504...

- A `watch` alternative that runs in the current shell. https://github.com/bigH/dotfiles/blob/3d48792b4e910d2fc82504...

I suggest:

C-x C-e in the CLI (not sure if it’s zsh only) will open your command line in your $EDITOR - useful to get code highlighting and write multi line commands if that’s the blocker. The problem is iterating.

OR

Pipe your awk input to a file and then use this thing I wrote to build up your awk program. I use it most often with `jq`.

https://github.com/bigH/interactively

TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of Storybook.

So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.

Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.

Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling like it's a 20% project to learn some new tech.

So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable than Ladle, but something much simpler and less intrusive than Storybook.

This led me to create Exhibitor (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor) (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).

I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!

Exhibitor, a snappy & delightful React component workshop, is GA. My aim is for Exhibitor to be an extremely fast, easy to use, and delightful tool for creating front-end component libraries.

It's been around 2 months since my last mention and quite a tonne has changed.

Wiki: https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/wiki

Looks interesting. Coincidentally, I've just completed the bulk of work on a distributed Websocket network system to synchronize certain bits of state between multiple clients for my own kind of Storybook tool [0]. How interesting!

This kind of tool is exactly what I would have needed, instead of the approach I've taken which is a bit kludgy, grass-roots, novice-like, etc.

Good work :)

[0] https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/pull/22

I was a bit deflated when my submission about https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor fell through the HN floor-boards.

Think Storybook but simpler, faster, better Typescript support, and uses esbuild by default.

...Is the aim. I'm the sole lead dev working on it at the moment up against the ~10-20 strong team who built most of Storybook, so it's a long road ahead, but it's growing into something I'm quite proud of and happy about.