This could actually be a pretty big deal

1. The Eclipse foundation has been making alternatives to VS Code’s “killer apps” (Docker, Python, Go, C++, SSH, Live share, etc). AKA the closed source ones exclusive to VS Code offical that make all forks of VS Code a huge downgrade. The Eclipse foundation is also running the extension store that powers VS Codium.
2. “why not just use VS Codium?” (With the killer extensions made by Eclipse)
   • VS Codium is great, but because of manpower limits, they always have to be “downstream” of VS Code. They can’t rewrite any of the core systems.
   • As someone who contributes to VS Code, and loves VS Codium, many issues I have with VS Code have been open on github for +7 years, with hundreds of comments and thumbs-ups. We can’t even sort the file explorer view by last-edited and folders-first (but we can do folders-first alphabetical). Thats been open since 2017.
   • Theia looks like it could finally be the hard fork I’ve been waiting for. A hackable editor, trying to be open source, where all my extensions work, and the community can actually make a PR, get it merged, and extensions are not excessively sandboxed.
   • Will it be that? Only time will tell, but the Eclipse foundation has a pretty good record. They’re definitely prepared for long term support.

“Select where you heard about typst”
-> Fediverse

Finally somewhere that actually has Fediverse as an option, this must be a good app.

Just commenting here to ping you that I found a new major alternative! I’ve edited the comment but TLDR; search “.NET Avalonia” and see what you think

The “front page” of most instances are not interesting to average people or to professionals (e.g. local gov that wants to go open source, like those switching to Mastodon).

Part is lemmy’s hot-sort is basically broken as a ranking, another part is bad language filters, another part is that major communities here (fediverse, Linux memes, star trek memes, science memes, etc) are off-putting to out-of-group people because of so many in-group jokes. Its a hard fix.

This is pretty cool. I’ve got a couple repos that Microsoft uses for VS Code. I switched one of them to GPLv3, but maybe I’ll switch the other to this license.

Same haha.

I’ve already started it twice for lemmy, but didn’t put in heavy effort yet. I’ve got a wrapper for nix that helps with common issues, but its on the messy side.

There are so many small GUI apps I want to make but I refuse until I can get Tauri to build an appimage and macos app within nix. It was more than a year ago since I put a lot of effort on that though. If you’ve got any tips/pointers or examples for tauri I’d be happy to hear them.

Sadly it still causes system instability even if you NEVER need the feature.

You might not need numpy at all, but Pandas needs numpy and Opencv needs numpy. Sometimes pandas needs one version and Opencv needs a different version. Well… python only allows one global verison of numpy, so pandas and opencv fight over which one they want installed, and the looser is forced to use a numpy they were not designed/tested for. Upgrading pandas might also upgrade numpy and break opencv. That causes system instability.

Stable systems like cargo coupld upgrade pandas, have pandas use numpy 1.29 without touching/breaking opencv (opencv would still importing/using using numpy 1.19 or whatever). That stability is only possible if the system is capable of having two versions of the same dependency at the same time.

And FYI to OP, if you can’t install two versions of the same library at the same time (ex: numpy 1.25 and numpy 1.19) then the answer to “has its dependencies under control?” is generally “no”.

• Deno (successor to NodeJS) is “yes” by default, and has very very few exceptions
• Rust can by default, and has few but notable/relevant exceptions
• Python (without venv) cannot (even with venv, each project can be different, but 1 project still can’t reliably have two versions of numpy)
• NodeJS can, but it was kind of an afterthought, and it has tons modules that are notable exceptions

deleted by creator

The more reliable/reproducible the container is the more pain/effort it is to setup. If you don’t need reliability, then you don’t need containers.

• If you want unbeatable reliability, use nix.
• If you want better-than-nothing use venv/anaconda envs (one or the other, not both)
• If you want the most reliability-per-effort and don’t care about performance, use distrobox

For standard notes, its got an auto-export plaintext file option on desktop. Were you wanting two-way editing of plaintext? (e.g. Auto export and import)

When you’re editing yaml, why not just always write JSON?

Almost all nix attr keys are unquoted strings. Maybe I’m missing the point list, but I kinda wouldn’t expect it to be on the list.

Despite my love of yaml. I actually think he has a small point with unquoted strings. I teach students and see their struggles. Bash also does unquoted strings and basically all students go years and years without realizing

cat --help
cat "--help"
# ^ same thing

cat *
cat "*"
# ^ not same thing

cat $thing
cat "$thing"
# ^ similar but not the same 

To know the difference between special and normal-but-no-quotes you have to know literally every special symbol. And, for example, its rare to realize the -- in --help, isn’t special at a language level, its only special at a convention level.

Same thing can happen in yaml files, but actually a little worse I’d say. In bash all the “special” things are at least symbols. But in yaml there are more special cases. Imagine editing this kind of a list:

js_keywords:
- if
- else
- while
- break
- continue
- import
- from
- default
- class
- const
- var
- let
- new
- async
- function
- undefined
- null
- true
- false
- Nan
- Infinity

Three of those are not strings. Syntax highlighting can help (which is why I don’t think its a real issue). But still “why are three not strings? Well … just because”. AKA there isn’t a syntax pattern, there’s just a hardcoded list of names that need to be memorized. What is actually challeging is, unless students start with a proper yaml tutorial, or see examples of quotes in the config, its not obvious that quotes will solve the problem (students think "true" behaves like "\"true\""). So even when they see true is highlighted funny, they don’t really know what to do about it. I’ve seem some try stuff like \true.

Still doesn’t mean yaml is bad, every language has edge cases.

Its easy for me to say “just start writing JSON in the yaml. It doesn’t get more simple than JSON”, but actually I do think there’s a small point with the unquoted strings.

Back before I knew programming, I was trying to change grammar settings sublime 2, which uses yaml. I had no idea what yaml was. The default setting values used unquoted strings fot regex. I knew PCRE regex and escapes, but suddenly they didnt work, and when I tried to match a single quote inside of regex that also didn’t work. I didn’t know I was editing yaml file (it had a .tmLanguage extension). Even worse, if I remeber correctly, unparsable settings just silently fail. Not only did I have no errors to google, I didn’t have any reason to believe the escapes were the cause of the problem (they worked in the command line). Sometimes I edited the regex and it was fine, and other times it just seemed to break. I didn’t learn about quoting in YAML until years later.

For me that was an unfortuate combination, which was exacerbated by yaml unquoted weirdness. But when you’re talking about “did you read the spec” that’s a whole other story. .nan for nan, tabs vs spaces, unquted string weirdness, etc should just be one error message+google away. I think they’re a small hiccups with what is overall a great format.

For context, Tea (the cli tool) was created by the author of homebrew. But for some reason he changed the name to pkgx and made tea into the crypto thing: From the creator of Homebrew, Tea raises $8.9M to build a protocol that helps open source developers get paid

He’s probably interested in blocking these kinds of PR’s.

I have read the 1.2 spec (I’m trying to make a round trip parser for JS, and I do maintainance on a fork of the rumel yaml python package). I actually think its very well thought out, with things I hadn’t considered like future extensibility, streaming applications, and data-corruption detection.

The diagrams, color coding, and less-formailty of the spec was much appreciated. Especially compared to something like the ECMA Script spec, which reads like a math textbook had a child with a legal document.

I’m not saying YAML is perfect; round trip (the thing I’m working on) is nearly impossible because it wasn’t a design goal. It has a few too many features (I’ve never seen a declaration in the wild), but it does a good job at accomplishing the creators goals, and the additional features basically only slow down parser-implementers like me. I often pick it because of the tag support, which I’ve struggled to find an equivalent for in other serialization languages. I use anchors in recursive data structures, and complex keys for serializing complex data structures (not human readable). The “document end” marker has been nice when I’m worried about detecting partial-writes. And the merge key is nice for config files.

The application/perspective matters. Yaml might be bad for you but its not bad for everyone.

Also

I’ve exhausted every EXE-generating option I could find [for python]

Unfortunately software is one giant mess right now. You’d think things like compiling to an EXE for python would be standard. They’re not. One day, maybe 15 years from now, we will have Nix be user friendly, a single line installer for everything, and have it all “just work”. But until then, almost everything is hacked together.

Overview of (basically) all GUI systems

I believe Flutter, React Native, and Android studio are the only major ones I don’t have experience with.

EDIT! (2024-4-30) .NET Avalonia seems like a great modern option that I have not gotten to try. Its C# and fully cross platform. It could be a real game changer compared to the options I’ve listed below

• Yes as far as I know theres no good exe maker for python. Python without dependencies (or async) is great, a nice little scripting lang for prototyping or data analysis. Python with dependencies is terrible, truly awful for packaged user-applications.
• C++ / C are and effectively will always be miserable IMO. You’ll basically never be able to automate it without nix. Make, cmake, autoconf, pkg-tools, ant, etc they’re all a mess. For example, biggest blocker to python packaging is that many python packages are wrappers around C/C++ packages. The most annoying thing about one of the tools I’m about to mention (electron) are the dependencies that secretely use C++.
• The most modern, consistent, and cross platform graphical systems right now are Electron and Tauri, which are literally browsers with URL bar/buttons removed. Electron is what Discord, Spotify, and VS Code use. Its bulky but theres a lot of support/tutorials. Tauri is the new, faster/cleaner kid on the block and uses the Rust language, which has good dependency management. But Tauri doesn’t have the tutorials or ecosystem yet. Also Rust is a very hard language. For both you’ll need to learn Javascript/HTML/CSS, which is probably good. But you’ll also need the terrible npm ecosystem, and get introduced to javascript frameworks which seem great until theyre not. That said, basically every cross platform not-browser GUI I know of (JavaFX, QT, TCL/TK, WxWidgets, FLTK) has exactly the miserable experience you’re getting; lots of dependency hedaches, and weird graphical differences between operating systems. Also that list is in order, with FLTK being untouchable garbage, and JavaFX being the least-bad in my experience.
• Even if you’re okay with using a broswer, (which solves lots of dependency/setup problems, and is the most useful/flexible UI system I’ve used) it still has stupid API problems because HTML was originally made to display documents (like microsoft word documents). It wasn’t meant to be a full blown UI system; it just became that over time. Stuff like styles and positioning in HTML has edgecases, like “fixed” meaning absolute and “absolute” actually meanting “relative to parent” and “relative” meaning “relative to where the element would normally be”.
• Unity game dev (uses C#, which is similar to Java, but better IMO) might actually be worth looking into for your case. First check the unity API’s for your images and GPS tasks. The good news is they support packaging up applications for every OS. The bad news is you can’t automate the setup because its proprietary. The (very good) open source alternative is Godot.
• The final alternative is, just don’t go cross platform. This is the only not-mess, not hacky, intentionally-designed toolset approach I know of. MacOS has Swift and XCode, Microsoft has Visual Studio and C#. Neither are great but they’re both the “this is how we expect you to do it” approches. You might be able to adapt these to other platforms (swift has been gaining some cross platform support and the .net runtime for C# can be cross platform).

My perfect setup would be Tauri (with all security disabled), with Deno accessible on the front end, all installed/setup by Nix. But alas, that doesnt exist yet. Even with +3 years of nix experience I can’t even get Tauri running in Nix.

I’d like directions on how to set up a software project with dependencies, so that future contributors can pitch in with the least amount of set-up required when they clone the repo

Unforunately that kind of task, with our current tools, is not a junior level task. I have worked on automating project setups for almost a decade; creating a single command that is cross platform install of all dependencies, project ENV setup, and in a way that doesn’t break the users existing system(s), or causes the project to bitrot. The only real way at the moment is through Nix (nixpkgs), which is unfortunate because Nix is very difficult to setup and use. If you start a small project in nix its not too bad, but adapting an existing project often is, especially anything with graphical tooling.

I made Deno gulliotine to help with first step of cross-platform setup, but once the setup begins to install packages/languages it all needs to be done with nix to be reliable.

Also FLTK is miserable. I’m not a huge fan of QT, but it is at least definitively better than FLTK. Wx Python is also miserable, avoid it like the plague.

• Use cloc to get an idea of line count.
• See how hard it is to find the entry point
• Try building it
• Try hacking a feature into it
• Try hacking a bigger feature

Thing is, for repos of any typical size, its going to take a lot more than a glance to know.

For example the Atom Editor codebase is immaculate, best formatting/commenting I’ve ever seen. But getting it to build is a nightmare, so its too hard to contribute to/hack.

Lots of times you just have to dive down the rabbit hole

Wow, most of these were new to me. I’m testing them for a few minutes and so far they’re working great. I’ve been avoiding Google’s voice to text for a while, and hadn’t found a good maps app either.