Changes inside on.initialize are minefields. Until now, if you made a mistake when modifying on.initialize, you could end up in a situation where the app would fail irrecoverably on the next startup. You'd have to go dig up a text editor to fix it. After this commit, errors in on.initialize wait for commands from driver.love just like any other error. Recovering from errors during initialization is a little different than normal. I don't know how much of initialization completed successfully, so I redo all of it. I think this should be safe; the sorts of things we want to do on startup tend to be idempotent just like the sorts of things we do within an event loop with our existing error handling. Things are still not ideal. Initialization by definition happens only when the app starts up. When you make changes to it, you won't find out about errors until you restart the app[1], which can be much later and a big context switch. But at least you'll be able to fix it in the usual way. Slightly more seamless[2]. One glitch to note: at least on Linux, an app with an initialization error feels "sticky". I can't seem to switch focus away from it using Alt-tab. Hitting F4 on the driver also jarringly brings the client app back in focus when there was an initialization error. But the mouse does work consistently. This feels similar to the issues I find when an app goes unresponsive sometimes. The window manager really wants me to respond to the dialog that it's unresponsive. Still, feels like an improvement. [1] I really need to provide that driver command to restart the app! But there's no room in the menus! I really need a first-class command palette like pensieve.love has! [2] https://lobste.rs/s/idi1wt/open_source_vs_ux |
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|---|---|---|
| assets | ||
| 0000-freewheeling-start | ||
| 0001-on | ||
| 0002-Debug_animations_in_progress | ||
| 0003-refresh_debug_animations | ||
| 0004-on.update | ||
| 0005-animate | ||
| 0006-loiter | ||
| 0007-save_callstack | ||
| 0008-Debug_animation_period | ||
| LICENSE.txt | ||
| Manual_tests.md | ||
| MemoryReferenceInfo.lua.0 | ||
| MemoryReferenceInfo.lua.unused | ||
| README.md | ||
| app.lua | ||
| button.lua | ||
| default_map | ||
| edit.lua | ||
| file.lua | ||
| json.lua | ||
| keychord.lua | ||
| live.lua | ||
| main.lua | ||
| nativefs.lua | ||
| reference.md | ||
| search.lua | ||
| select.lua | ||
| test.lua | ||
| text.lua | ||
| text_tests | ||
| text_tests.lua | ||
| undo.lua | ||
README.md
Example "freewheeling" app that can be modified without being restarted
Running this repo in isolation won't be very helpful. If you haven't yet, first check out the driver app. This repo is a template you can copy to create your own live apps that juggle text editor widgets. The editors support copy/paste, search, infinite undo, etc. You can't modify editor functionality live (yet?).
Some reference documentation on how to create your own apps.
This repo is an example of a Freewheeling App, designed above all to be easy to run, easy to modify and easy to share.
Getting started
Install LÖVE. It's just a 5MB download, open-source and
extremely well-behaved. I'll assume below that you can invoke it using the
love command, but that might vary depending on your OS.
Run this app from the terminal, passing its directory to LÖVE
Hacking
To modify it live without restarting the app each time, download the driver app. Here's an example session using a fork of this repo:
If you run a .love file, your changes will go into the save directory. If you unzip the .love file into a new directory and run the directory instead, your changes will go straight into the same directory.
Keyboard shortcuts
Up to you! But within the included editor widget if you use it:
ctrl+fto find patterns within a filectrl+cto copy,ctrl+xto cut,ctrl+vto pastectrl+zto undo,ctrl+yto redoctrl+=to zoom in,ctrl+-to zoom out,ctrl+0to reset zoomalt+right/alt+leftto jump to the next/previous word, respectively- mouse drag or
shift+ movement to select text,ctrl+ato select all
Exclusively tested so far with a US keyboard layout. If you use a different layout, please let me know if things worked, or if you found anything amiss: http://akkartik.name/contact
Known issues
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Both freewheeling apps and the driver for them currently benefit from being launched in terminal windows rather than by being clicked on in a desktop OS. See the driver app for details.
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No support yet for Unicode graphemes spanning multiple codepoints.
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No support yet for right-to-left languages.
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Undo/redo may be sluggish in editor windows containing large files. Large files may grow sluggish in other ways.
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If you kill the process, say by force-quitting because things things get sluggish, you can lose data.
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Can't scroll while selecting text with mouse.
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No scrollbars yet. That stuff is hard.
Mirrors and Forks
This repo is a fork of lines.love, an editor for plain text where you can also seamlessly insert line drawings. Its immediate upstream is text.love, a version without support for line drawings. Updates to it can be downloaded from the following mirrors:
- https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/template-live-editor
- https://codeberg.org/akkartik/template-live-editor
- https://nest.pijul.com/akkartik/template-live-editor (using the Pijul version control system)
Further forks are encouraged. If you show me your fork, I'll link to it here.
- https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/luaML.love - a "browser" for a Lua-based markup language, loosely analogous to HTML except it's all Lua.
- https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/bf.love - a toy environment for working with BF programs.
- https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/broadsheet.love - a multi-column paginator that uses all available width while remaining readable.
- https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/crosstable.love - for all-play-all tournaments.