xilem VS zotero

The web browser gives us an extremely frictionless development and deployment process. Our CI generates a fully deploy at a unique link for every commit which lets us open and test PRs with a single click. It deploys updates to users without needing to make them go through an updater. In these relatively early stages of our development process, the importance of the velocity that gives us cannot be understated. Plus, the ability for users to try it out in one second is quite helpful.

I've designed the whole architecture specifically to avoid the web UI "feeling like a web app" with the subtle latency of interacting with the site. I wrote all-custom UI components using the minimal amount of HTML and CSS to achieve the requirements instead of depending on an external component framework which always loves nesting dozens of `div`s inside each other to achieve what should be doable in one or two. And our highly-lightweight JS which calls into Rust (Wasm) lets it keep the slow logic out of slow JS. And we are using Svelte to move most of the frontend DOM management logic from runtime to compile time. This architecture really helps us keep performance levels as close as possible to feeling native despite using the web for its GUI rendering; and I believe it has succeeded at feeling responsive by comparison to most other web apps you use (even Slack, for example, which shouldn't be nearly as complex).

Web lets us build fast, deploy the latest version to users fast, leverage prevalent developer experience with HTML/CSS for creating GUIs, and avoid getting stuck in a box with Rust's currently-immature GUI ecosystem. That's the tradeoff we had to make early on, and it was a good decision. But we will eventually move towards a fully native version...

In the short term, we plan to use [Tauri](https://tauri.app/) which is sort of a hybrid between Electron and a native application. It uses the OS's webview to shrink the shipped binary to only a few megabytes and reuse shared memory resources with other webviews at runtime. It also runs all our Rust code natively instead of through WebAssembly so all the business logic in Graphite runs natively and only the thin UI layer becomes dependent on web tech for the GUI display.

In the long term, we plan to rewrite the entire GUI in [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem) which is the up-and-coming Rust GUI that I believe will finally get everything right, including performance (which is something many desktop GUI frameworks are actually bad it, and sometimes even worse than web). We'll still deploy a web version but at that point, it will become native-first.

Hopefully that roadmap and explanation of the architectural decisions clears up any worries about the short and long term state of our GUI.

That said, Xilem is very close to that idea, but it's in its very early stages and nowhere near Flutter's capabilities.

xilem#62 demonstrates how Xilem's reactive layer can target DOM nodes.

Inspired by Xilem, Leptos and rui, Floem aims to be a high performance declarative UI library with minimal effort from the user.

There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:

- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)

- https://github.com/vizia/vizia

- https://github.com/marc2332/freya

- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)

What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:

- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)

- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)

- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)

- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)

In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)

Yeah, Druid is being replaced by Xilem, but unfortunately Xilem isn't ready yet. So that whole project's in a bit of an awkward in-between phase where there isn't really any toolkit that can be recommended.

Third, we are discontinuing Druid proper. Years of experience has shown that people can struggle with the Druid data architecture and we can do better. This layer will be replaced by a new project called Xilem. We have spent a lot of time thinking about it and this decision was not taken lightly. You can read a more detailed post about the Xilem architecture but the gist of it is that we've found at a way to code UI in Rust that feels a lot more effortless than previous attempts. Xilem will look very intuitive to those familiar with state of the art toolkits such as SwiftUI, Flutter, and React, while at the same time being idiomatic Rust. Also we plan to port as many widgets from Druid to Xilem as possible, which should give the project a reasonable timeline to v0.1. Hopefully later this year.

Maybe try Zotero[1]. There are many addons which can do what you need.

[1]https://www.zotero.org/

And next time, you use a real literature management program like zotero (some university libraries offer classes, there is a r/zotero, etc) or jabref to create a proper bibtex file with the references. It is not that difficult, and keeps you sane (esp. if a paper has to be formatted for a different publisher). See e.g. learnlatex.

Zotero | Remote | Full-Time or Part-Time | https://www.zotero.org

Zotero is an open-source project that develops software to help people collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share their research. Our software is recommended by most universities and used by millions of students, scholars, scientists, and researchers worldwide.

We're looking for a JavaScript developer to work on Zotero "translators" — the pieces of code that let people click a button in their browser toolbar on any webpage and save high-quality metadata and files to their Zotero libraries. If you like web scraping, APIs, data formats, and exploring sites in the browser devtools, this would be up your alley. As a core Zotero developer, you'll also have the ability to work across Zotero's vast ecosystem and help shape the future of the project.

This is an open-ended contract role that can scale up and down in hours based on availability and workload.

https://www.zotero.org/jobs

Zotero is your answer, it even auto generates your citations.

https://www.zotero.org/

Apparently there are plugins for Logseq and Obsidian as well.

Zotero - Price: Free Free and open-source reference manager that helps you collect, organize, and cite your research sources.

I use the free and open source Zotero which I think you'd find very calibre-like and manage notes and concept linking with org-roam in emacs.

If you can't hold the urge to know, you can check on the Zotero web library if all of your things are still there

Resources: ZOTERO. Zotero is a free (you can pay to get more storage), open-source citation manager with optional browser plugins. IT WILL FORMAT CITATIONS FOR YOU. (sometimes you have to edit them, but most of the time it can pull metadata and format things correctly on its own). You can sort your references into folders or with tags, read and annotate PDF copies on your computer or in a mobile app, and make notes - which I used to keep track of specific quotations I wanted to use.

You can also use online resources like The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences, that I think is mostly free or the Handbook of Archaeological Sciences which I think is also mostly free. If you can't get a hold of those things you can also email the authors/editors and they might send you a free copy or look them up on Academia.edu and see if they have a free version. Also, if you don't already, use Google Scholar, it's the best resource for finding free articles and topics to read. It's also never too early to start using something like Zotaro, Mendeley, or Endnote to keep track of your readings and help you with citations/references in papers. You can literally download the citation, import it into one of those systems and it automatically formats your referencing.