Integration of Glow as a TUI Task Dashboard

[ProfessorManhattan]

Hey, I have created a couple different forks of Task. One of them integrates the Glow TUI menu so that when you run task --menu it shows a very pretty TUI menu that helps developers navigate through tasks easier --- the main goal is to help developers onto a project quicker.

Here's the fork: https://github.com/megabyte-labs/task-dash
Here's an issue where we are discussing the possibility of merging this into the upstream project: megabyte-labs/task-dash#1
Another fork with a bunch of new features (documented in the README): https://github.com/megabyte-labs/bodega
YouTube walkthrough that might be helpful if you want to test the feature (also runs through some of the issues with it): https://github.com/megabyte-labs/bodega

Thunderstruck started playing while posting this - https://www.cnet.com/culture/thunderstruck-a-tale-of-malware-acdc-and-irans-nukes/

[gedw99]

thanks !!

from video, i have a few thoughts:

markdown in "docs" not working. Nice feature ! Lets get it working eventually.

"return" VS "r". Yeah i also prefer "return", as it use friendly.

We should add a "--output json" to all commands so that other projects can call this and get the JSON output of it. this would allow other higher level projects to use use all of this from their own projects at runtime. So now Its got an API surface as well as its a CLI that you can drop down to if things are not working. I have used this pattern alot.
Conceptually is sort of like how the Markdown output works but its a JSON output.
The golang lib called "tablewriter" does this.

[ProfessorManhattan]

Hey @gedw99 --- wow... the JSON idea is great!! I wanted to make a GUI so I actually had someone play with opening a websocket but maybe another library can handle the connection and just get the data from --json. I think some of the code for the websocket might be in the Bodega fork.

[ProfessorManhattan]

Yup --- I see --server runs as a server in the README for Bodega

[gedw99]

GUI is a good ifea.

You get it about the json output. Great .

the gui can call the cli and the json output allows the user to see what’s happening.

I doubt this will be accepted upstream but a gui will make it pretty popular with non text users . Could see this really taking off

[gedw99]

Can build the gui on golang too and cross compile to web wasm, desktop and mobile if you want.

majes it easy to develop the project cause it’s all golang and so you don’t get the split team problem etc.

It’s how generally do gui

[gedw99]

Also because the project uses a giant amount of task files would be good if the gui had a property tree .

Search can also work with it

so you can see all tasks and their relationships.

the cli can feed this to the gui as a property set .

the gui can then show a tree view of a node graph .

the tree view is for navigating the task graph

ghe node graph is for seeing the tasks running. It’s a common way of debugging , observing a graph pipelibe.

You can then edit a node via the property sets and what’s the node graph update .

Hope I have not lost you . It’s a lot to take in

[ProfessorManhattan]

@gedw99 -- that's a good idea - wasn't even thinking about using it as an editor... not sure if I would want to lead the project but if you need a TS developer I could help out.

Anyway, how can we get the dashboard merged into this project?

[gedw99]

If you mean the main go-task project ,,,

ask the maintainer if they want it.

strip out the yaml in the config folder too. You’re going to need a registry. Git hub repos can be a registry store.

Probably a few other aspects too that I don’t know that I don’t know

[ProfessorManhattan]

Yeah, the merge would have to be 🍒 picked to only include the go modifications. Hopefully I didn't run an auto formatter on the code 😬

…

On Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 3:36 PM Gerard Webb ***@***.***> wrote: If you mean the main go-task project ,,, ask the maintainer if they want it. strip out the yaml in the config folder too. You’re going to need a registry. Git hub repos can be a registry store. Probably a few other aspects too that I don’t know that I don’t know — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1077 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AOJRHXNCWQTFXRTU2TBQ3P3W5NICNANCNFSM6AAAAAAWDONOQM> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[ghostsquad]

@ProfessorManhattan could you update the description with the link to the YouTube video? It looks like there was an erroneous double paste of the github repo link.

[andreynering]

Hi @ProfessorManhattan,

Sorry for taking a bit to respond to this.

I don't think I have a strong opinion at the moment on whether we should bring this TUI into Task or not.

For one side, a simple TUI could be useful and I think many users would like that. On the other side, every feature we bring into the codebase needs to be maintained, and I'm not sure how much code that means or how complex it is.

So, some thoughts:

1. If easy enough, you can consider opening a PR with the code so we can take a look to try to understand better how that works. If that's not too easy, consider just pointing me into the right files in your codebase instead, so you don't have unnecessary work as there's no guarantee we'd merge that.
2. Instead of maintaining a whole fork of Task, you may want to move your project to use the new --json flag. That's already being used by the VSCode extension, and I believe it could be easier to maintain compared to a fork. That looks like a good alternative to me: a community project that's just an additional binary (task-tui or task-menu, for example).

I think I'm currently inclined to prefer option 2, maintained by the community. This way we (the main maintainers) can keep focused on the core tool, which is already a significant amount of work.

[gedw99]

Hey all,

I have been suing these 2 !!

I feel like task-tui could be the basis of a Community maintained one @andreynering

It does NOT import github.com/go-task/task/v3, which I surprised about. I cant decide if thats a good thing or not actually. Loose coupling is good or bad ? I personally think that importing github.com/go-task/task/v3 would be the smart thing, but maybe there are reasons I dont know about.

Anyway here is it:
Glow goang based.
https://github.com/aleksandersh/task-tui

Web HTMX based also. Only runs inside docker, but kind of cool for controlling your deployed stuff.

https://github.com/titpetric/task-ui

[pd93]

It does NOT import github.com/go-task/task/v3, which I surprised about. I cant decide if thats a good thing or not actually. Loose coupling is good or bad ? I personally think that importing github.com/go-task/task/v3 would be the smart thing, but maybe there are reasons I dont know about.

For the record, here are the reasons to use/not use the package:

• github.com/go-task/task/v3 is not stable. We have never made a compatibility guarantee on this for a couple of reasons:
  • Task is primarily a CLI and this is our main focus. Our CLI does have a compatibility guarantee (with the exception of experiments).
  • The ability to break things significantly increases our ability to refactor/tidy up the code. Task grew very quickly and had many features added which were not considered in the original design. The stability of the package will likely improve over time and may become stable at some point, but this is not a promise.
• Things that use github.com/go-task/task/v3 can pin a version, but they will have to update to get new features. This might break things.
• We have a --json interface. This was originally designed as programmatic support for external tools (such as the VSCode extension). It is obviously less powerful than using the package. However, it allows tools to be written in any language and the API is stable.

[gedw99]

Thank you for the explanation

that tui works really well .

never failed me …

regarding versioning .

we have a schema, so we can evolve it.
On startup I check the task file schema and pull the right task binary using wgot. Works great so far .

https://github.com/bitrise-io/got/tree/master/cmd/wgot

it’s like wgdr but for any OS in golang .