Augedit prototype

Augeas is a great tool for string to tree transformation. I created a GUI to make it visual and more interactive. The prototype app is called Augedit. It displays the Augeas tree on the left side, and on the the string representation on the right side. By selecting a node in the tree, the label and the value matched are highlighted in the text view. Here is an example with a trivial key/value lens, one record per line.

Behind the scene, it uses span information of the selected path to recover the file content and highlight the key and the value. The app is in Vala and uses Gtk toolkit.

The prototype as of now is only a viewer. This could be extended in many ways:

• Edition capabilities, where the tree and the text are synchronized as the user types
• Providing a view to query and display results
• XPath expression builder, so that they can be validated and then used in scripts
• Highlight the whole match for a sub-tree  The information is available from the span, but I haven't been able to set alpha channel for colors in Gtk.TextView. Using pango/cairo/webkit based widget to display the text may be the solution.

Vala is quite nice, I like the idea of having bare metal binaries and the integration with Augeas with the bindings works great, documentation on valadoc.org is excellent. However, GCC complains because of the C code generated and it's a bit annoying  part of it is my fault (using deprecated stuff, like Gtk.Box() for instance). For more code examples, I'm using yorba projects as reference, like geary and shotwell. Finally, debugging is not as convenient, because of the additional layer of code generation.

The code is on github: https://github.com/giraldeau/augedit

Have fun!

Presenter assists

I was a volunteer at EclipseCon 2013. One of the task consists to help the speaker keep on time, by displaying cardboards showing the remaining time of the session. For fun, I and François Rajotte made a small QML app for that purpose (and most of all to experiment with QML). The app is based on a timer, with color transition when remaining time goes under some threshold. It is really hacky, but it works!

Usage:

• Start or reset the timer: click anywhere in the window
• Full screen: press "F"
• Quit: press "Q"

We definitely should be able to set the start time (not all sessions have the same length) and the list of threshold with custom colors should be customizable. It requires an additional UI component, and those settings should be saved.

As for QML, it's quite cool. The rendering is flicker free and it's quite easy to make animations. We had one issue with keyboard events. We extended a QAction and overloaded the method eventFilter to get key events. The problem is the method always returned "true", as if we should stop forwarding the event to other event filters. It turns out that it was preventing QML to behave properly, because its handler runs after our own. Be aware!

The code is on github: https://github.com/giraldeau/presenter-assists