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Author here: This project is incredibly buggy and immature at this point and not really intended to be run yet. I am blown away by the reception. Notes for peo

Author here: This project is incredibly buggy and immature at this point and not really intended to be run yet. I am blown away by the reception. Notes for people trying to run this: - it is MacOS only - the window bounds are hardcoded for my system, because GPUI lacks a way to center a fixed size window - the accessibility is pretty much non-existent. GPUI doesn’t provide an accessible text input yet, so this is a hacky minimal implementation. If there are any questions about this project or developing with GPUI, feel free to ask!

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I appreciate you adding the caveats section to the README:) It's nice to clarify those things up front
- mgrandl 3y ago
  Jup for sure. To be honest I didn’t intend for this to get posted yet. Just wanted to show it to the Zed team because they expressed interest.
osener 3y ago
Nice project! How was your experience building with GPUI? How does it compare to other native GUI libs, if you’ve used any?
- mgrandl 3y ago
  Thank you! I have mostly worked on web apps before this. I built the same app with Tauri before deciding to move to GPUI and a pure rust UI. Pros: - GPUI is heavily inspired by Tailwind, which made me productive pretty quickly. - I love the tight coupling between the Rust structs and the rendering. Makes for nice and reusable components similar to Svelte. - It's obviously purpose built for performance/latency and it shows. I haven't optimized Loungy at all, but it feels way smoother than the previous Tauri version. Cons: - GPUI is very obviously still in it's infancy. There isn't even a text input! - There is no animation system. This is a huge drawback compared to CSS/Svelte - There is no global hotkey API like in Tauri. But I could just take the hotkey crate by the Tauri guys and make it work for GPUI.
rane 3y ago
> Initially I wrote it using Tauri as I am familiar with web technologies, but quickly got fed up with moving info from rust side to the webview Could you elaborate on this part? As I recall, communication between webview and the node.js backend was my main gripe with Electron as well. Sounds like it hasn't been solved in Tauri.
- mgrandl 3y ago
  I mean it's fine for the most part, but I had to serialize/deserialize a lot because I wanted to keep all the business logic in Rust. Also there was some very noticable latency after serializing in Rust -> moving state to the Webview. However I am not ruling out that I just failed to follow Tauri best practices.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
danpalmer 3y ago
A different question, what was it about Raycast's extension model that frustrated you enough that you built this? I've authored/contributed to quite a few extensions at this point, and have had a remarkably good experience with it.
- Ezhik 3y ago
  Having tried both Alfred and Raycast, I prefer Alfred since I can create custom searches without having to setup an entire new extension - all it takes is creating a shell command that can return JSON in a specific format.
- mgrandl 3y ago
  I agree for 99% of extensions their model is amazing. And I wouldn't expect me to come up with a better one any time soon. The problem is that I want to do more in my launcher. Two examples: - I wasn't happy with the official bitwarden extension, because going through the clipboard and copy/pasting individual items felt cumbersome. They also only supported one vault even though I asked about this years ago [0]! In raycast I wrote my own bitwarden extension that hooked into Hammerspoon and used the AX spoon to autofill credentials. That felt very hacky though so in my own launcher I am using the accessibility API directly through swift-rs. - I wanted to build my own keyboard centric matrix chat client into raycast. I got pretty far, but in the end I was just too limited by the available components. Also I discovered that once your extensions heap reaches 100 MiB, it just gets killed. That basically made it impossible to just load the matrix-sdk including crypto. In the end I just didn't want to keep investing time in some proprietary software that doesn't allow me to do what I want to do :) [0] https://github.com/raycast/extensions/issues/1544 https://github.com/raycast/extensions/issues/1544
  - Arathorn 3y ago
    which sdk were you using? there are tricks to keep heap down.
    - mgrandl 3y ago
      the matrix-js-sdk. I think the problem was that the crypto part is just loading a huge binary (WASM?) which instantly caused the extension to crash.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

I appreciate you adding the caveats section to the README:) It's nice to clarify those things up front

mgrandl 3y ago
Jup for sure. To be honest I didn’t intend for this to get posted yet. Just wanted to show it to the Zed team because they expressed interest.

osener 3y ago

Nice project! How was your experience building with GPUI? How does it compare to other native GUI libs, if you’ve used any?

mgrandl 3y ago
Thank you! I have mostly worked on web apps before this. I built the same app with Tauri before deciding to move to GPUI and a pure rust UI. Pros: - GPUI is heavily inspired by Tailwind, which made me productive pretty quickly. - I love the tight coupling between the Rust structs and the rendering. Makes for nice and reusable components similar to Svelte. - It's obviously purpose built for performance/latency and it shows. I haven't optimized Loungy at all, but it feels way smoother than the previous Tauri version. Cons: - GPUI is very obviously still in it's infancy. There isn't even a text input! - There is no animation system. This is a huge drawback compared to CSS/Svelte - There is no global hotkey API like in Tauri. But I could just take the hotkey crate by the Tauri guys and make it work for GPUI.

rane 3y ago

> Initially I wrote it using Tauri as I am familiar with web technologies, but quickly got fed up with moving info from rust side to the webview Could you elaborate on this part? As I recall, communication between webview and the node.js backend was my main gripe with Electron as well. Sounds like it hasn't been solved in Tauri.

mgrandl 3y ago
I mean it's fine for the most part, but I had to serialize/deserialize a lot because I wanted to keep all the business logic in Rust. Also there was some very noticable latency after serializing in Rust -> moving state to the Webview. However I am not ruling out that I just failed to follow Tauri best practices.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

danpalmer 3y ago

A different question, what was it about Raycast's extension model that frustrated you enough that you built this? I've authored/contributed to quite a few extensions at this point, and have had a remarkably good experience with it.

Ezhik 3y ago
Having tried both Alfred and Raycast, I prefer Alfred since I can create custom searches without having to setup an entire new extension - all it takes is creating a shell command that can return JSON in a specific format.
mgrandl 3y ago
I agree for 99% of extensions their model is amazing. And I wouldn't expect me to come up with a better one any time soon. The problem is that I want to do more in my launcher. Two examples: - I wasn't happy with the official bitwarden extension, because going through the clipboard and copy/pasting individual items felt cumbersome. They also only supported one vault even though I asked about this years ago [0]! In raycast I wrote my own bitwarden extension that hooked into Hammerspoon and used the AX spoon to autofill credentials. That felt very hacky though so in my own launcher I am using the accessibility API directly through swift-rs. - I wanted to build my own keyboard centric matrix chat client into raycast. I got pretty far, but in the end I was just too limited by the available components. Also I discovered that once your extensions heap reaches 100 MiB, it just gets killed. That basically made it impossible to just load the matrix-sdk including crypto. In the end I just didn't want to keep investing time in some proprietary software that doesn't allow me to do what I want to do :) [0] https://github.com/raycast/extensions/issues/1544 https://github.com/raycast/extensions/issues/1544
- Arathorn 3y ago
  which sdk were you using? there are tricks to keep heap down.
  - mgrandl 3y ago
    the matrix-js-sdk. I think the problem was that the crypto part is just loading a huge binary (WASM?) which instantly caused the extension to crash.