Thor VS Stimulus

Ruby has always been a great general-purpose scripting language and is often used to create command-line utilities. Many of these use the excellent Thor gem to parse command-line options, but there's no escaping one fact: command-line utilities just aren't interesting. Never have been, never will be.

All public methods in the generator will be called one after the other. Private methods will not be called but are available in your public methods like regular Ruby classes.

ruby: http://whatisthor.com

I will add that if you want to develop a CLI tool that gives you various commands that you can run, I would have a look at something like thor to keep it organised and documented. But this is completely unnecessary as a first step - you can simply create a Ruby file that does a thing you want and invoke it directly.

Not to be confused with generator functions (which you might be familiar with from Python or Javascript), Rails generators are custom Thor commands that focus on, well, generating things.

I wanted to provide a command-line interface for the user that was easy to use, and I also wanted to provide the flexibility with the options used to render the animation. After looking around online I found that Thor was a good tool to utilize. It allowed me to easily create a number of options that make this program much more versatile. An example below shows how a user can select which folder the source images are in, as well as what the background and foreground colors should be:

I've used Thor a lot, but it's kind of terrible. It uses a custom non-POSIX-compliant option parser (ex: method_option :list, type: :array -> --list one two three, where as the POSIX way is --list one,two,three or --item one -- item two --item three) and will not error on unknown options or exit with -1 when not enough args are given. If you want a better CLI library, checkout dry-rb, command_kit, or cmdparse.

And Thor might be worth looking at if you have complex scripts: https://github.com/erikhuda/thor

I also recommend checking out the docs for Stimulus and Turbo to familiarise yourself with all their features and the APIs used in this series.

Any tips on preparing to work with Wiz as an incoming intern. I heard its identical to Stimulus: https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/

use Stimulus

With Stimulus, you've got a powerful tool to take your app's interactivity up a notch. For even more awesome features and Stimulus wizardry, check out the Stimulus Documentation.

The next version of Stimulus makes it easier to access parts of the private API thanks to my pull request.

I like Stimulus, it was a bit pushed by Symfony with their ux thing.

I thought it'd be https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/ for a minute but I think that ecosystem is tied too closely with rails.

Hey HN!

For those new to Rails, Stimulus (https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/) is a way to sprinkle frontend javascript code into your Rails views.

I held off using Stimulus in my Rails apps for a long time because I didn't understand it — the data= attributes looked weird, and the connection between my Rails views and Stimulus javascript controllers was confusing.

So I decided to write the guide I wish I had when I was learning Stimulus.

Hope you enjoy it! I'm happy to answer any questions, feel free to ask any.

Thanks, Harrison

Hey /r/rails, these past few weeks, I've been working on a beginner's guide to Stimulus and I'm excited to finally share it!