This looks promising!
As an extremely heavy Alfred user I'd love to see a fully open source alternative (Raycast is a full no for me due to the subscription). I'd definitely donate towards development if it gets a bit further along.
Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
31–40 of 44 posts
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#32First I thought "well, zed is just another editor, pfff" but the more news I see about it, the more it gets relevant. Especially the GPUI because it gets an alternative to Electron and Taurin. And rust..
I don't think its fair to compare GPUI with Electron until GPUI goes cross-platform, since that's the main selling point for Electron.
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ra…
which sdk were you using? there are tricks to keep heap down.
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ra…
which sdk were you using? there are tricks to keep heap down.
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.
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
[deleted]
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
which sdk were you using? there are tricks to keep heap down.
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.
mm, right. crypto is indeed WASM - either libolm (which is only 150KB of WASM) or vodozemac (our new rust impl, which is 5.5MB of WASM unstripped). Neither use much heap though - probably only a few 100KB.
The main heap management trick for matrix-js-sdk would be to turn on (experimental) sliding sync mode, which means that it only syncs the rooms it cares about - so O(1) with number of rooms, rather than O(N). However, i'm guessing you probably weren't testing with a large account?
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#37Mac is a sickness. Even M$ play nicer and do less damage to the tech ecosystem than this walled garden of incompatible code and build process. Managing to break Rust's cross-platform compatibility is no small feat! "congrats".
>Managing to break cross-platform compatibility is no small feat
Neither GUI, nor application paths and standards are built in to rust.
I’m as critical of the rust fanboyism as anyone. I don’t see a specific purpose for this app that, as far as I can tell, already exists and is built in to MacOS, indicating that it’s an example being “upvoted for rust” (not saying “don’t build things”. Practice and fun are perfectly valid reasons to build something that exists). But you could at least bring valid points.
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#38Aside: I don't believe I'd run across the Lucide library of free SVG icons before (linked in the credits)… very nice!
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#39I 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.
Do you know how far away from adding AccessKit the Zed team is?
Re: Loungy: An Application Launcher Written with GPUI, the Zed GPU UI Framework
#40GPUI 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 :)
Thanks for the reply! That makes a lot of sense given where it is right now. Hopefully it will flesh out over time, but I'll definitely be giving it a look!