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Status-update-September-2021.md (2624B)

    

  1. ---
  2. title: Status update, September 2021
  3. date: 2021-09-15
  4. outputs: [html, gemtext]
  5. ---
  7. It's a quiet, foggy morning here in Amsterdam, and here with my fresh mug of
  8. coffee and a cuddly cat in my lap, I'd like to share the latest news on my FOSS
  9. efforts with you. Grab yourself a warm drink and a cat of your own and let's get
  10. started.
  12. First, a new project: [visurf][0]. I [announced this][1] a few days ago, but the
  13. short of it is that I am building a minimal Wayland-only frontend for the
  14. [NetSurf][2] web browser which uses vi-inspired keybindings. Since the
  15. announcement there has been some good progress: touch support, nsvirc, tabs, key
  16. repeat, and so on. Some notable medium-to-large efforts ahead of us include a
  17. context menu on right click, command completion and history, kinetic scrolling
  18. via touch, pinch-to-zoom, clipboard support, and a readability mode. Please
  19. help! It's pretty easy to get involved: join the IRC channel at \#netsurf on
  20. libera.chat and ask for something to do.
  22. [0]: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/visurf
  23. [1]: https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/11/visurf-announcement.html
  24. [2]: http://www.netsurf-browser.org
  26. The programming language is also doing well. Following the codegen rewrite we
  27. have completed some long-pending refactoring to parts of the language design,
  28. which we intend to keep working on with further refinements in the coming weeks
  29. and months. We also developed a new frontend for reading the documentation in
  30. your terminal:
  32. <script id="asciicast-q53ZaG138sp89gKYqo1fui9Qj" src="https://asciinema.org/a/q53ZaG138sp89gKYqo1fui9Qj.js" async></script>
  34. Other improvements include the addition of parametric format modifiers
  35. (`fmt::printfln("{%}", 10, &fmt::modifiers { base = strconv::base::HEX, ...  })`),
  36. fnmatch, and (WIP) design improvements to file I/O, the latter relying on new
  37. struct subtyping semantics. I'm hoping that we'll have improvements to the
  38. grammar and semantics of match expressions and tagged unions in the near future,
  39. and we are also looking into some experiments with reflection.
  41. Many improvements have landed for SourceHut. lists.sr.ht now has a writable
  42. GraphQL API, along with the first implementation of [GraphQL-native
  43. webhooks][3]. Thanks to a few contributors, you can also now apply custom sorts
  44. to your search results on todo.sr.ht, and builds.sr.ht has grown Rocky Linux
  45. support. More details to follow in the "What's cooking" post for the SourceHut
  46. blog.
  48. [3]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-08-25-graphql-native-webhooks/
  50. That's all for today! Thanks for tuning in for this update, and thanks for
  51. continuing to support our efforts. Have a great day!