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Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

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Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#21

Post by mgrandl »

CitizenKane wrote: post #20

GPUI is looking more and more interesting by the day. I haven't had the chance to dig into it. Can anyone with experience comment some more on how it compares to other UI frameworks? Seems like it's a really compelling alternative to things out there. On the surface, seems almost like a rust variant of Qt, but not having to deal with C++ potentially makes it much more widely applicable.

Author here: it is definitely still early and a lot of what you would expect from an GUI framework is missing. It just gives you the bare minimum of building blocks.

You can think of it like building a website with exclusively and :)

Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#22

Post by jenadine »

I wouldn't take a bet in using GPUI at this moment. Not just because it is limited to MacOS (the developers promised a cross-platform release in the future). I haven't seen any commitment regarding stability. There's not even online docs or a version available on crates.io yet. They might make changes without regard for stability. Are they going to make breaking changes while they're modifying their Zed editor simultaneously within the same mono repo? The Zed team, presumably preoccupied with their own editor, might not prioritize needs for other use cases.

Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#23

Post by mgrandl »

jenadine wrote: post #22

I wouldn't take a bet in using GPUI at this moment. Not just because it is limited to MacOS (the developers promised a cross-platform release in the future). I haven't seen any commitment regarding stability. There's not even online docs or a version available on crates.io yet. They might make changes without regard for stability. Are they going to make breaking changes while they're modifying their Zed editor simult…

Author here: well aware of all of that. I am in close contact with the Zed team on their Discord and they are aware of this project (they even shouted it out on their Twitter).

If there are going to be breaking changes, I can live with that as this is not a commercial project.

Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#24

Post by mgrandl »

rane wrote: post #19
mgrandl wrote: post #7

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 h…

> 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.

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.

Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#26

Post by pzo »

CitizenKane wrote: post #20

GPUI is looking more and more interesting by the day. I haven't had the chance to dig into it. Can anyone with experience comment some more on how it compares to other UI frameworks? Seems like it's a really compelling alternative to things out there. On the surface, seems almost like a rust variant of Qt, but not having to deal with C++ potentially makes it much more widely applicable.

It seems that Warp.dev also might be using GPUI - at least that was my impression based on their website [0] (I might be wrong though). Which is a good think that another popular project is consuming such crate.

[0] "... we partnered with Nathan Sobo, co-founder of the Atom text editor, who had already started building a Rust UI framework that was loosely inspired by Flutter"

https://www.warp.dev/blog/how-warp-works

Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#27

Post by mgrandl »

pzo wrote: post #26
CitizenKane wrote: post #20

GPUI is looking more and more interesting by the day. I haven't had the chance to dig into it. Can anyone with experience comment some more on how it compares to other UI frameworks? Seems like it's a really compelling alternative to things out there. On the surface, seems almost like a rust variant of Qt, but not having to deal with C++ potentially makes it much more widely applicable.

It seems that Warp.dev also might be using GPUI - at least that was my impression based on their website [0] (I might be wrong though). Which is a good think that another popular project is consuming such crate. [0] "... we partnered with Nathan Sobo, co-founder of the Atom text editor, who had already started building a Rust UI framework that was loosely inspired by Flutter" https://www.warp.dev/blog/how-warp-works

I think they started out using GPUI, but might have diverged. They mention flutter and GPUI v1 was Flutter inspired. GPUI v2 which is what's not released to the public isn't Flutter inspired anymore.

Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#28

Post by danpalmer »

mgrandl wrote: post #7

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 h…

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.

Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#29

Post by Ezhik »

danpalmer wrote: post #28
mgrandl wrote: post #7

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 h…

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.

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.

Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework

#30

Post by mgrandl »

danpalmer wrote: post #28
mgrandl wrote: post #7

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 h…

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.

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

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