You can start with the libcosmic repository, and the examples contained within. We’re going to work on revamping our design demo application soon, which will be a learning resource for COSMIC application development
In my experience, that has never been an issue with any Rust-based projects. It’s quite the opposite. 80% of time is spent completing the first 20% of the project, and then the remaining 80% is quickly finished as everything fits into place. Most of our time is spent in foundational work getting widgets created that we can use with our theme system, and then the actual implementation of the interface in the application is stupid easy.
What you describe is what I felt developing the GNOME extensions. There’s very little you can do to resolve issues that you encounter there.
COSMIC Edit is being developed by our manager through personal motivation; who also developed cosmic-text, so this is the perfect playground for simultaneously advanced cosmic-text, and developing useful real world software with it. The git diff view was not yet part of planned designs, but it took only a portion of a day to implement. It adds a useful test case for the cosmic-text library, and improved cosmic-text as a result.
We’re all paid a full time salary to work on COSMIC and Pop!_OS. Each person on the team is going to spend a full day writing software, regardless of what they’re working on, so concerns about burnout are somewhat silly. Burnout is typically caused by working overtime for extended periods of time. System76 has never required developers to work overtime to meet a deadline, and variety of workload can alleviate mental fatigue, so burnout is not a thing here.
GNOME users wouldn’t be happy having to install KDE dependencies to use a KDE text editor which doesn’t have a consistent look and feel on their desktop. Same applies for KDE users.
You are heavily overestimating how much effort is required to develop a text editor. It’s a single person project using components that had to be developed for use in multiple applications; regardless of whether there is a text editor or not. Components that you’d be silly not to develop through a text editor project.
You are trying too hard to justify that we not make a text editor. It feels like you don’t want us to make a text editor at all. No one is on a path to burnout. Everyone is paid a full time salary to work on their respective areas. COSMIC development is doing really well.
As is often the case with scientific research which many people believe to be pointless, technological innovations aren’t always made by achieving the end goal, but through the technologies developed to reach that goal.
Development on COSMIC Edit has lead towards improvements to the cosmic-text library, which is used by many GUI libraries in the Rust ecosystem now. Similarly, the UX designs for the text editor improves the COSMIC interface guidelines, and puts design theories to practice. Likewise, widgets that are necessary for the editor are added to the COSMIC platform toolkit, and existing widgets and features are improved to improve the development experience for applications like this.
No one would want to build applications for a platform that lacks widgets capable of properly displaying, formatting, and editing text. Many would also find it debilitating to have a desktop environment without a text editor preinstalled. Imagine if GNOME didn’t have Gedit, and KDE didn’t have Kate.
Besides, this is a default text editor for a desktop environment. It is really not that complex. The goal is not to develop an IDE, but a text editor that anyone would feel comfortable using as their default editor on the COSMIC platform.
GNOME was focusing on building Rust bindings for GTK for many years before Qt development picked up. The GTK bindings were usable within a year or two after Rust’s 1.0 release. Yet even today, those looking to build applications in Rust will find that GTK is the only mature toolkit right now. And if you’re doing that today, I’d recommend starting with Relm4 for the best GTK Rust experience.
Rust does not support the C++ ABI, and Qt does not provide a C interface, so much work has to be done on building the tooling for binding C++ libraries to Rust. That work is still ongoing, so some have opted to use QML instead of interfacing with Qt C++ libraries. Yet if you’re looking to use Qt or QML, you may as well use Slint instead. It’s developed by former Qt/Trolltech developers and has a similar approach as QML.
You don’t seem to realize that this is equivalent to that. The user already made the choice to install a desktop environment which generates themes. So if you make the choice to build an application with GTK, and you want users to be able to use system themes with it, then consider it done.
To argue otherwise would make you a hypocrite. It would mean that you don’t actually want users to use themes, so you take issue with desktop environments which make it easy to do so by default. So if you want people to be able to use themes, then you shouldn’t complain when people choose to use a desktop which enables that use case.
You’re so silly. If the developer doesn’t want a themeable application, then either don’t use a themeable toolkit, or hardcode the theme so that the system theme is ignored.
Yes, this can already be seen when configuring a personal theme in the Desktop > Appearances page in COSMIC Settings. Compositor elements, applets, the login and lock screens, and COSMIC applications automatically adjust in realtime to the configuration changes.
Yes, the libcosmic toolkit automates a decent chunk of the process to building an application with our interface guidelines. If building an application with the cosmic::Application trait. Which includes the header bar, navigation bar, and context drawer.
We will attempt to automatically generate themes for common toolkits, but the desktop environment has no control over how the toolkit chooses to render itself or operate.
It uses a custom UI framework, St, using renderer primitives built into the compositor, mutter. Whereas COSMIC is using the same libcosmic library inside the compositor, applets, and desktop applications. Thanks due to our Smithay client toolkit being used to provide a renderer for iced which supports the Wayland layer shell protocol.