Posts tagged with "Rogallo"

A couple of days ago I thought I had history working well in the Gemini client I'm working on; I was wrong. It worked, but the more I used it the more I felt it wasn't quite right. The main problem was I had a single history structure that served both the navigation history (moving backwards and forwards) as well as the general location visit history (the list of places I've visited). It made sense initially, but in use it just wasn't cutting it.

So now I've redone it, using two different history lists that also grow in rather different ways. For the navigation history, when "adding" a new location, everything after the current location gets removed, making the new location the latest in the list. The visit history, on the other hand, grows more like an ordered set: if I add a location that is already in the list, the older version is removed and it is added to the end of the list. In doing this, it's also allowed me to track the date and time I've visited a location, which means I can now have a useful history panel (which can be popped in and out of view) that shows me where I've been, and when.

Having done this, I now want to take some of these approaches and apply them to Hike. It has a pretty simple location and navigation history system that suffers from the same issues that I wasn't liking in this project. It'll benefit quite a bit from this improvement. I sense a v2.0.0 of Hike in the next few months.

As for when I'll let this project see the light of day: I think I'm close to opening the repository and publishing the first version to PyPI. I had wanted to do it sometime yesterday, but the above kicked in and I've been tinkering more to try and make a stable foundation for the initial release. There's still a lot of work needed for it to be feature-complete, but there's enough here to play and experiment.

Work continues on my terminal-based Gemini client. So far today I've done a bunch of work on tweaking the presentation of a site, improving some of the widgets that go into the on-screen document. I've also added the start of a history system. So now it's easy to navigate backwards and forwards between pages.

While there's still a lot of work that I want to do on it, I feel that with the addition of this feature, it might be close to time for me to make it public. It's going well and heading in the right direction, so it feels like the moment when I accept it's not going to be something I abandon, but now have to see to completion.

There are also some design choices I've made this time around that have made me want to revisit Hike at some point in the future. Not for a while yet, but I want to go back and clean up some of the code. After AI-based coding I've been doing lately, it's really nice to be hands-on again and designing every single line. It's a good reminder that working this way ensures a much bigger-picture view of how an application hangs together, and how it can benefit other applications you're maintaining.

Yesterday I got the basic framework of my Gemini client up and going, and this evening I've been working on getting rendering of the gemtext in place. It's not the most tricky format to handle, so the parser and Textual widget to display the result have come together pretty quickly.

With this in place I've got the core of a working client now. Next up is going to be adding history with forward and backward navigation, then after that things like bookmarks and so on.

Following on from the initial release of Wasat yesterday, I've got a very basic proof-of-concept client up and running. So far, so good. Here it is loading up my own capsule on GemCities:

There's a lot to do yet, it'll be some time before this turns into a public project, but having it at least load up a document from a capsule means there's enough there for me to want to keep going and developing this.

Also, as I said yesterday, this is all home-grown and hand-crafted code. BlogMore has been tons of fun, but it's nice to kick off a significant bit of Python code where I'm writing it all myself. It's nice to be in that flow state once again.