ui-mock VS TiddlyWiki

It's quite possible to develop Rust for Windows without using Windows.

Try my open source "ui-mock".[1] This is a test of the cross-platform stack. Just get the repository with "git clone", and make sure you have Rust installed for target "x86_64-pc-windows-gnu". See the Cargo.toml file for build instructions.

This is a game-type user interface. It's just some menus and a 3D cube. It doesn't do much, but it exercises all the lower levels. This allows debugging cross-platform problems in a simple environment. The main crates used are winit (cross-plaform window event handling), wgpu (cross-plaform GPU handling), rfd (cross-platform file dialogs), keychain (cross-platform password storage), egui (Rust-native menus and dialogs), and rend3 (safe interface to wgpu). For graphics, it uses Vulkan, so it will run on Windows back to the last release of Windows 7. Not Windows 95, though; it's 64-bit. It will also run under Wine, so you don't even need a Windows system to test.

My metaverse client uses the same stack. It's compiled on Linux, and runs on both Linux and Windows. So I'm building a high-performance 3D graphics program for Windows without even owning a Windows system or using any Microsoft software.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

Profiling on the CPU side is well handled by tracy, which is a game-oriented profiler. My programs render-bench and ui-mock are prepped for Tracy, as is Rend3, so you can try it out on them.

ui-mock -- game GUI test fixture This exercises rfd->egui->rend3->wgpu. It's a game GUI with menus and dialogs, but no game behind it, just a 3D drawing of a cube. It's useful for making bugs in that stack repeatable. That's been helpful in wringing out obscure bugs in egui.

Egui works well with Rend3. Here's my example and library for that. It's a dummy game UI; no game, but brings up menus atop Rend3 3D. Egui is very low level. Each dialog takes a lot of code. Something to generate dialogs from some kind of template would be useful. I have many of those to do. Incidentally, does anyone have examples of good color themes for egui? The default is shades of black on black, which is a bit harsh. I'd like to see some examples where the aesthetics are better.

There's an attempt to make this work for Rust desktop applications. There's the winit crate, which does cross-platform windowing and event loops. There's egui, for menus and subwindows. There's rfd, for file dialogs, which are special for security reasons. And there's wgpu, for cross-platform 3D.

I'm using all of these in my ui-mock,[1] which is a GUI for a game without the game. It has 3D graphics with 2D GUI elements on top. I'm using this to shake down all the cross-platform problems for my metaverse client. My own code, which is 100% safe Rust, has no platform dependent code.

Results are pretty good. There's minor dirty laundry in those libraries, which has been reported to the various maintainers. Stuff like this:

- You can get a file dialog hidden behind the main window, which, in a full screen program, is a real problem. Mostly a Linux problem; works fine on Windows.

- Full screen on Windows mode under Wine 7 crashes Wine. Known Wine bug.

- Warnings from WGPU, but it works around all of them with some minor performance loss.

- Cross-platform packaging, to make a Windows installer without Windows, isn't implemented yet.

So, not big stuff. A lot of stuff works that you might not expect to work, such as profiling with tracy. Wgpu is taking care of Vulkan vs Apple's Metal. (Apple just had to Think Different, to the annoyance of everybody doing 3D.) Opening a web page in the default browser is cross-platform. You can cross-compile - I build the Windows version on Linux, without using any Microsoft tools.

With some more work, I could make this work on WASM and Android as well, but that requires some special casing, mostly because WASM doesn't have proper threads.

So cross-platform desktop development is working pretty well. Most of the problems I'm running into would not appear in a more typical application.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

I have a Rend3/Egui/WGPU program, https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

> What does ownership mean here?

It means owning the code and the data. With webapps, the code and data are hosted and owned, the users do not own the code, cannot run it independently. This is a clear dileneation between owner and user, and the owners can use that clear line to create artificial scarcity of various kinds. (The most popular being the subscription SaaS model). It's also easier to defend your IP since end users never see your binaries.

I like to make my software single html files whenever possible. People can just save them and run them locally. Havent met anyone who cares yet though.

I like that idea a lot, and I care. I think others care, but yes, it's a niche interest. Take a look at https://tiddlywiki.com/ for an example of a fairly successful project that uses the single html format running locally. However it suffers from limitations on File|Save which often requires a separate runtime of some kind to support.

Another project that approaches this ideal is https://redbean.dev/, @jart's tiny, performant, featureful single-file webserver. In this case the "single file" is a server executable + zip whose state must be updated on the command-line, but I think hits a sweet spot in terms of practicality, and a global minima when it comes to minimizing dependencies. (Redbean bundles SQLite and Lua so it's also possible to do through-the-web state updates as in a traditional webapp.)

My own project, Simpatico, aspires to be something along these lines. Eventually your browser tab is both a client and server process, connecting via websockets to other connected browsers, storing all state locally. I call this pattern "monomorphism", a play on the "isomorphic" javascript SPA. The server[2] is currently written in ~1 node file, but eventually I would like to port to redbean (and greenbean, the websocket version of redbean, but it isn't quite ready yet). The server grew several features to support a fast, practical BTD loop using markdown[1], and safe, performant execution on the public internet[2], but ultimately I'd like to pare it down to serving a single html file and allow the connected clients to provide all diversity of experience. I've used it to explore all kinds of browser apis, from crypto[3] to svg[4] to writing my own libraries (combine[4] and stree[5]). And it's all running locally, and easily hosted on a $5 VPS, and its all open source.

1 - https://simpatico.io/lit.md

2 - https://simpatico.io/reflector

3 - https://simpatico.io/crypto

4 - https://simpatico.io/combine

5 - https://simpatico.io/stree

I use TiddlyWiki. It's a portable editable wiki that doesn't require a web server or web hosting. You open it from your computer, edit it, and save it. You get all of the linking that you'd expect to see in a wiki, and it's super readable and easy to use.

It is a single-HTML-file TiddlyWiki instance that runs in a web browser (offline as well as online), meant to be downloaded and stored wherever suits you best. Everything that you see when working in BASIC Anywhere Machine (everything that makes "BAM" work as an IDE and all BASIC programs) exist in the one HTML file.

TiddlyWiki still works as intended: https://tiddlywiki.com/#GettingStarted but there are so many different clients to run on. Mobile or Desktop ? What OS? What Browser?

This effort https://val.packett.cool/blog/tiddlypwa/ is remarkable as the mobile side of saving is not as robust as on the desktop side of things and there is a scaling limit on performance as the number of tiddlers grows. Also the syncing between tw documents between different desktop/mobile clients can be a challenge with diffing.

Since then I've moved back to plain vanilla vim for a wiki (map gf :tabe ) but tw.html is still good for data other than plain text and TiddlyPWA https://tiddly.packett.cool/ is a great effort to revisit TiddlyWiki again.

You should check out TiddlyWiki as it’s designed around the concept that small linkable notes are the best way to organize.

https://tiddlywiki.com/

It’s html based so you can access it in the same way you would access a website but it can be locally stored. Saving is a bit tricky but there are multiple solutions detailed on their site. https://tiddlywiki.com/

Hi, you can use tw on nodejs with npm package tiddlywiki....