nix-editor VS gtk-rs-core

I don't plan on it at this moment, however, if someone finishes the packagekit backend for Nix, the appstream data I'm working on collecting would work to display icons and screenshots. Also if someone who knew qt/kirigami development wanted to make something similar to nix-software-center, the backend tool that reads and modifies configuration values is a separate project: nix-editor, and I would be willing to help with any issues that arose from that.

You can mix and match as much as you want! Both tools use nix-editor to read and modify your configuration.nix file. So any changes made manually would be visible within the tools. Some more complex configuration structures might confuse the tools, but the goal is for it to just work

Tried it out, lots of cool features! The only nitpick I noticed was that it gets a bit confused with nested attributes, for example programs.gnupg.agent.enable = true; programs.gnupg.agent.enableSSHSupport = true; vs programs.gnupg.agent = { enable = true; enableSSHSupport = true; }; it doesn't seem able to handle the latter case yet. But if you ever wanted to, I made a crate that handles the backend of editing .nix file, nix-editor, crate here: https://crates.io/crates/nix-editor. It also uses rnix and handles all the attribute mess and editing files.

I definitely plan to support as much as I can, but there is definitely a level of complexity that can never be truly translated to a graphical tool. What I've found helpful during development for me is that I split the frontend GUI and the backed parser and editor into two projects (nixos-conf-editor and nix-editor), that way I could tackle a lot of the parsing and editing alone without worrying about specific GUI features needed (and use it for other projects). Later when I need some feature I add it to nix-editor. So far nix-editor supports simple attribute modification, array adding and popping, and recursive attribute definition and dereferencing. It's definitely not perfect by any means, but so far it's been enough for the projects I've been working on. I definitely need to credit any success I've had so far to the developers of rnix-parser which translates nix expression to easy to manage ASTs.

nix-software-center> [1/6] Generating src/resources_gresource with a custom command nix-software-center> xml-stripblanks preprocessing requested, but XMLLINT is not set, and xmllint is not in PATH nix-software-center> [4/6] Generating data/dev.vlinkz.NixSoftwareCenter.metainfo.xml with a custom command nix-software-center> FAILED: src/nix-software-center nix-software-center> /nix/store/p643r4aczmzb0dhyrx3dj592f0s5v7xj-coreutils-9.0/bin/env CARGO_HOME=/build/r4npznxg986vxdl3gh7jhmqvv8jbvf02-source/build/cargo-home /nix/store/2gwhsd2jcz90zni0pwlhhfbmfbflixws-cargo-1.60.0/bin/cargo build --manifest-path /build/r4npznxg986vxdl3gh7jhmqvv8jbvf02-source/Cargo.toml --target-dir /build/r4npznxg986vxdl3gh7jhmqvv8jbvf02-source/build/src --release && cp src/release/nix-software-center src/nix-software-center nix-software-center> ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed. error: builder for '/nix/store/m9kf43zsr5hkq2igfdnag0phq154igks-nix-software-center-0.0.1.drv' failed with exit code 1; last 10 log lines: > building > build flags: -j8 -l8 > [0/6] Generating src/cargo-build with a custom command > error: package cairo-sys-rs v0.16.0 (https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk-rs-core#9fe7e5ce) cannot be built because it requires rustc 1.63 or newer, while the currently active rustc version is 1.60.0 > [1/6] Generating src/resources_gresource with a custom command > xml-stripblanks preprocessing requested, but XMLLINT is not set, and xmllint is not in PATH > [4/6] Generating data/dev.vlinkz.NixSoftwareCenter.metainfo.xml with a custom command > FAILED: src/nix-software-center > /nix/store/p643r4aczmzb0dhyrx3dj592f0s5v7xj-coreutils-9.0/bin/env CARGO_HOME=/build/r4npznxg986vxdl3gh7jhmqvv8jbvf02-source/build/cargo-home /nix/store/2gwhsd2jcz90zni0pwlhhfbmfbflixws-cargo-1.60.0/bin/cargo build --manifest-path /build/r4npznxg986vxdl3gh7jhmqvv8jbvf02-source/Cargo.toml --target-dir /build/r4npznxg986vxdl3gh7jhmqvv8jbvf02-source/build/src --release && cp src/release/nix-software-center src/nix-software-center > ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed. For full logs, run 'nix log /nix/store/m9kf43zsr5hkq2igfdnag0phq154igks-nix-software-center-0.0.1.drv'. error: 1 dependencies of derivation '/nix/store/clykb6wwpv08l2vxnvnx8br7fzpx2y63-system-path.drv' failed to build error: 1 dependencies of derivation '/nix/store/321q6c143bf5w7m8njzvqkhjillbssk5-nixos-system-nflx-erahhal-t490s-22.05.20220902.67e4507.drv' failed to build

"Automatically figuring out which parent objects the class you're subclassing derives from"

AFAIK this is a language limitation, there is no way in a Rust macro to take a type and get all the traits that are implemented for that type.

"Helpers for properties and signals"

There is an open issue for this: https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk-rs-core/issues/27

"A flat list of methods, instead of the public/imp split"

You can already do this in your code and use "pub fn" and "fn" like normal.

"I feel like I had a difficult time figuring out how to share state between widgets. You end up with lots of OnceCell, Rc, and RefCell, and it quickly becomes confusing,"

I think you are supposed to use bind_property and the gtk::Expression objects to do data binding, though that part is not so convenient to use from C or Rust either.

Ideally this should be automated with a nice derive macro, see https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk-rs-core/issues/27 . How that could look exactly is still up to discussion and not so easy while keeping it flexible. That derive macro would then likely also work with the id: usize parameter to the property setter/getter instead of the string name.