Where do I even start?

[ghxstweb]

Hi Simon! After reading through some of the files in the kando electron app, there are a number of things that completely escape me. For example, just to get it to work on GNOME wayland, seems like you are using Clutter objects in the extension/adapter. Where would I learn how to use Clutter objects and GNOME features so that I can actually manipulate them?

This project just seems like a massive amount of work, and even 3 years is incredibly quick to get something like this up and running! Im not entirely new to electron, nor javascript, but where would you recommend a newcomer look when trying to make sense of the codebase? Thanks for all your help and support!

[Schneegans]

Hi there! Thank you very much for your interest in the project and for the kind words!

I am myself still learning a lot here (it's my first Electron project) so the code base is pretty volatile and may change significantly in the future. Once it is a bit more mature, I'll definitely write some architecture documentation. For now, there is only the documentation in the source files. But I think it is quite well organized already:

• src/main.ts is the entry point for the main Electron process. This creates the KandoApp which will create a Backend depending on the current OS and desktop environment. This backend provides functionality like registering global hotkeys, simulating keyboard events, or getting the current pointer location. Once the registered shortcut is pressed, the KandoApp will call showMenu() which will send the prototype menu structure to the renderer process of Electron.
• src/renderer.ts is the entry point for Electron's renderer process. The renderer process currently loads two main components which are mostly independent from each other: The Menu and the Editor. The Menu class is responsible for drawing the actual pie menu. It is pretty much self-contained and will emit some events when the user selects things. The Editor is very much work-in-progress and will become much more complex eventually.
• In src/common is some code which is used by both, the renderer and the main process. For now, this is mostly the definition of types which are sent between the two processes via IPC.

Developing the backend for GNOME via the adapter extension was pretty easy for me, as I have quite some experience in developing GNOME Shell extensions 😉. The documentation for Clutter is available here.

In order to understand the main process code, I would suggest to start a the init() of the KandoApp and dive into the methods as required. All the backends provide the same functionality, so you only have to look at them if you are interested in them specifically.

I wouldn't look into the editor code for now, as this will change significantly.