Noctalia is an existing open source desktop shell, meaning it overrides the default statusbar/taskbar, notification system, overall system UI, etc and makes replaces them with a much better looking one.
These are some contributions I made to the project.
Let’s gooooo my PR got merged 2 days back. Now to finish the job, I just needed to write documentation about it, so I did that over here. The changes are live on Noctalia’s documentation website now!
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Now that I think about it, I should probably start writing the docs when I am pretty confident the PR will be merged, so that I don’t have to wait a long time for the maintainers to review my code.
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Nonetheless, it feels very good knowing that there was a feature which many people wanted (the original github issue got 8 likes, so it was highly requested), and I shipped it!!
So one of the maintainers left a comment with feedback for what I should do about 2 days ago. Today I finished addressing those issues in code.
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The reason it took this long is because I was legit just spending 2 hours or so just wondering what I should do! Basically, the other PR that was about the calendar system I mentioned earlier got merged and made the ICS parsing function take in a C++ std::stop_token, which I was unfamiliar with.
It turns out that it has to do with multi-threading and so I had a dilemma of whether I should make it parse the calendar data in a separate thread or not. I at first decided to make it multi-threaded but then changed my mind when I realized how hard it would be.
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There is a lot more to this though, if you are curious you can see more details in my PR comment.
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Also here’s a proper video of this feature in action!
Just finished my second contribution, sorry for not documenting it in more detail if you like that. Basically what I’ve done now is added for iCalendar files (*.ics) to be added to the calendar widget that is builtin.
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iCalendar files are a pretty universal way to add event to different calendars, heck the “big 3” (Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Microsoft Outlook) of calendar apps all support it. So, it is a fairly important thing to have.
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I was motivated to add this because I wanted to add my own *.ics files to the Noctalia calendar, but couldn’t due to this limitation. But not anymore! (that is if they merge my PR)
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What’s crazy is that while I was writing my PR, someone else literally made another PR that was also editing the calendar code, what a coincidence! I don’t think that our 2 PR’s will conflict with each other since we were editing different parts of it as well!
Ok the pull request got merged into the main source code, after just a small fixup! But I’m not done just yet, I still need to add to the documentation of the project.
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So I did that. Now that was my first contribution to an open source project where I typed real code! It wasn’t a huge change, but you have to start somewhere!
So after browsing through the source code of Noctalia for a while, I found out where the internal monitor brightness code was and I made the necessary changes so that the monitor brightness is automatically synced!
I somehow managed to wreck my local git history! Luckily this wasn’t a huge problem, and I was able to delete the local folder and clone my fork from github again. Still, it was a reminder of how it’s probably best to leave your local git clone alone.
Now I will make a PR on the Github and hopefully it gets merged!
Edit: the Github PR is here now
So the first thing I am going to do is add a setting where you can make it so that when you can sync all of your monitors to the same brightness percent.
I have completed the first step of this by adding an option to the settings page (it even syncs with the config file and everything!) although it doesn’t do anything… yet!
