Some 'Clawe' and 'Doctor' background

In Clawe, I'm ricing (read: overengineering) my machine with a slant toward developer productivity and interactive development. The goal is to make working on every part of it supported by a repl and good feedback loops.

The core of Clawe is mostly executed by Babashka - the clawe namespace is essentially a slew of stateless scripts (functions) that support keybindings and commands invoked via rofi or the command line.

Just above that fast and 'simple' (stateless) core, there's a server and ui layer I call Doctor. This term is chosen specifically to bring out the health-checking aspect. Ideally, Doctor knows the state of your systems and provides useful dashboards surfacing the status and options for 'correcting' problems, or cheatsheets/quick help for making changes to that state (e.g. dependency management, git repo status checks, etc).

So... electron?

I don't really have anything against electron - it seems like folks are pretty outspoken against it, I think because they find it to be bloated or difficult to work with. I've not really used it in anger tho.

I initially built up these dashboard with electron, and things worked pretty well. I wrote a small wrapper here: russmatney/clover. The name was intended as a clojure-overlay of sorts. I might reprise it with a Tauri implementation soon.

In order to control windows in clawe, I need some way to identify it - this comes down to setting the window's title, so that's the bit I had to implement in Clover. The title gets passed in as a command line arg, so you can arbitrarily run electron instances with urls and titles of your choosing.

It worked pretty well!

At some point Tauri came around, and it fills the same use-case, and I was encouraged to check out. I dove in, and it was fine, if not a bit faster, so, now I'm in Tauri.

It does feel lighter and like a modern, less-baggage version of Electron.

Tauri bits to share

> Caveat for this section: I built up the Tauri knowledge before Tauri hit 1.0, > and before this clojurescript template was added - that might be a better > starting point for folks getting started today.

My Tauri goals were the same as with electron - I want to arbitrarily create webviews, and ideally pass the window title and app url in on the command line.

I was able to achive that without too much trouble - after that I use the window manager itself to resize and control the app's behavior.

My tauri code at the time of writing is all here, in clawe's src-tauri directory.

./src-tauri/target/debug/doctor create-window \
    --title my-title --label my-label \
    --url http://localhost:3333

{:tasks
 {:requires ([babashka.process :as p])
  :init
  (do
    (def doctor-fe-url "http://localhost:3333")
    (def doctor-tauri-executable "./src-tauri/target/debug/doctor")
    (defn run-doctor-tauri-app
      ([name] (run-doctor-tauri-app nil name))
      ([opts name]
       (let [url   (:url opts (str doctor-fe-url "/" name))
             title (str "tauri/doctor-" name)
             label name
             cmd   (str doctor-tauri-executable " create-window"
                        " --title " title " --label " label " --url " url)]
         (shell {:dir (str (home-dir) "/russmatney/clawe")} cmd)))))

  topbar          {:doc  "Run the doctor topbar via tauri. Consumed from systemd service."
                   :task (run-doctor-tauri-app "topbar")}
  popup           {:doc  "Run the doctor popup window via tauri."
                   :task (run-doctor-tauri-app "popup")}
  todo            {:doc  "Run the doctor todo window via tauri."
                   :task (run-doctor-tauri-app "todo")}
  clerk           {:doc  "Run the doctor clerk window via tauri."
                   :task (run-doctor-tauri-app {:url "http://localhost:3334/notebooks/clawe"} "clerk")}
  clerk-workspace {:doc  "Run the doctor clerk-workspace window via tauri."
                   :task (run-doctor-tauri-app {:url "http://localhost:3334/notebooks/wallpapers"} "clerk-workspace")}}

Caveats/Extras

I noted some of these above, but just to call them out again.

Future

I hope to reprise russmatney/clover with a simple binary for running Tauri with passed params.

Ping me if you think this would be useful, as I'm sure there are more cli opts to include, and I could always use a little motivation. maybe you like window decorations? who knows?

Update!

Today ( 10/18/22 ) I created russmatney/clove as a successor to the dead russmatney/clover. It is based on a fresh cargo create-tauri-app, so is up to date as of today, at least.

Check out the repo for install and usage.