Live coding an app with Gleam, Lustre, Go and Wails.
In this session I get started on the real rewrite of the Snippet Expander UI to use Gleam.
First thing I tackle is getting the UI to ask the backend whether the Snippet Expander Daemon is running. Once that is working, I set it up as a periodic check using a timer.
I’ve just published the first video in a new series of live coding sessions where I’m developing with Gleam and Lustre to build the front end for a desktop app built with Go and Wails.
The first video is a bit of test of my recording setup where I walk through a minimal test of connecting Gleam to the Go based Wails back end via its generated JavaScript functions that always return a Promise, and are therefore a little tricky to handle in Gleam. It was quite a relief to come up with a fairly simple mechanism for calling the JavaScript functions through Gleam’s excellent “Externals” Foreign Function Interface (FFI) and end up with a usable Lustre Effect.
During the “Gleaming Wails” Always Developing series I’ll be replacing the Snippet Expander desktop app’s Svelte based UI with a Gleam based one, continuing my quest to learn Gleam, which I very much enjoy working with, but unfortunately don’t get to do full time.
As it’s a chunky piece of work that I’m signing up for, hopefully this project will help me get more familiar with the Gleam language and Lustre framework, and help hone my functional programming skills in general. Even though I’ve been programming for well over 40 years now, and getting paid for it for nearly 30, I’ve mostly been working with Object Orientated style languages, and so functional programming doesn’t come easily.
With luck, along the way some people will learn a thing or two from my fumblings, or get excited about having a go at programming with Gleam.
You can follow along while I code (mostly) in Gleam on my YouTube channel.
Live coding an app with Gleam, Lustre, Go and Wails.
In this session I’m just showing a super basic test Gleam and Lustre frontend for a Wails app that handles grabbing data from the Go back end via the JS IPC, handling the returned promise and converting it to an effect that Lustre can use.
Wow, I just created a new config for builds.sr.ht that worked first time!
That never happens, who ever creates a CI/CD config that runs without error when first submitted?!
Admittedly, not the most complicated of configs, but I suspect using Gleam and FreeBSD helped due to their simplicity and well thought out straight forward usage patterns.
I’ve just released v1.1.1 of Snippet Expander, “Your little expandable text snippets helper, for Linux”.
It’s just a small bug fix release to make setting the shortcut for opening the Search & Paste window a little less confusing, particularly on KDE Plasma.
Changelog:
* Ensure custom shortcut setting only shown in UI if using GNOME(ish) desktop
* Add default Ctrl+` Search & Paste window shortcut to KDE Settings app
I’ll give a little more detail in the next few sections, but first, here’s the changelog:
* Added search of schedules and events.
* Added display of event hook with args when mouse hovers over event name.
* Auto refresh setting is now saved for each user.
And shortly after v1.6.1 was released, WP Cron Pixie v1.6.1 was released too, with the following one line changelog:
* Example events setting is now saved for each subsite in a multisite install.
Search schedules & events
It’s now possible to search your site’s cron schedules and events, very helpful on a site with lots of events and custom schedules.
The search box can be found below the list of schedules and events.
If you enter some text into the search box that matches part of one or more schedule’s name, the list of schedules will be filtered to those schedules and their events.
In a similar way, if you enter search text that matches on part of a cron event’s name, it will be shown along with its schedule, but other events in the same schedule that do not match the search query will not be shown.
Display event hook’s arguments
When you search for something that happens to occur in a cron event’s hook arguments, the corresponding event is shown. That would be quite confusing unless you could see what the event’s hook arguments are, so now when you hover your mouse cursor over an event’s name, it shows the hook with it’s arguments.
Per-user auto refresh setting
While developing the search functionality detailed above, which also saves the last entered search text so it is restored when you return to the admin dashboard, I realised WP Cron Pixie wasn’t saving its settings at quite the right level.
Before WP Cron Pixie v1.6.0, all settings were saved at the site level, or on a multisite, at the network level.
Now, the Auto Refresh setting is saved per user as each user may have a different preference as to whether they want the cron schedules to automatically refresh or not.
The Example Events setting remains at the site level as when enabled it creates cron events for the entire site and is unable to be scoped to just a single user. However, while writing this very blog post I realised that the plugin was saving the Example Events setting at the network level for a multisite install, which makes no sense as WP-Cron runs in subsites, not at the network level. Hence how WP Cron Pixie v1.6.1 came into being, ensuring that the plugin can create its example events on any multisite subsite it is used on.
For a long long time (I have no idea how long it really was), I used the venerable Nord theme colours to theme my desktop and apps, and even my old website.
Then, when I rebooted my website, I just went with ye olde Twenty Fifteen theme, using the dark theme, it kinda worked well as a reflection of the colours I was using everywhere else in my digital life, and therefore screenshots I posted didn’t look out of place.
However, I’ve not been too happy with how my blog posts look in the Twenty Fifteen theme, the content area is just too thin for the type of code and screenshot heavy content I post. It wasn’t a great reading experience. So I felt it was time to find a new theme.
I wanted something super simple with a nice wide or easily altered content area, and preferably a Nord colour scheme, or super simple palette that I could alter to Nord colours, because I miss using that colour scheme, and for reasons I’ll go to into a second, it’ll match any screenshots going forward.
After not much looking around actually, I found the Blockbase theme, which is about as simple as it gets.
And after just a couple of quick tweaks, I got it to something which I really like, and so this here website now looks something like the following screenshot.
“What?! I thought you’d fallen back in love with Solus?”
… I hear you ask.
Well, I do still absolutely love Solus, it’s an awesome Linux distribution, so fast and simple to use, but I’ve been hitting a show stopper issue with running Docker projects that the maintainers have struggled to fix, and a few other smaller day to day problems that over time built up to make me start looking around for another distro.
After playing with a few BSD and Linux distros again, I thought I’d give COSMIC Epoch another go to see how it’s progressed since I last gave it a spin early last year.
Even though it is definitely an alpha as a few feature aren’t complete, and being based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is a bit painful, it’s so good to have a working Docker setup again, and I really like the COSMIC desktop in tiling mode.
To be fair, I generally use one app per workspace, but the shortcuts that the peeps at System76 have set as the defaults are spot on, and work very well for me when navigating workspaces etc.
In the above screenshot you might just be able to work out that I have my COSMIC config checked into a git repo, which means I can easily use it across all my desktops by checking it out to ~/.config/cosmic. When I saw Jeremy Soller demo that it’s safe to do that in a recent presentation, that was a clincher to get me to try COSMIC again. I’m glad I did.
I did initially try keeping my cosmic config in my ~/.dotfiles repo, which I then use stow to put into place. However, every now and then COSMIC would clobber the ~/.config/cosmic symlink, creating a directory in its place. So I switched to making it a directory itself, which just so happens to be a git repo so that I can track my changes and push them out to all my Pop!_OS machines. That seems to be working very well.
And now that I’m back to using Nord for all the things, if I finally get back to making videos for my YouTube channel again, at least I won’t need to change my thumbnail theme!
