Basic template

so. Slint.

I was gonna do the whole “design it in HTML first then port it” thing that I very wisely declared last time and then, naturally, did not do at all.

instead I saw Slint had a live preview and its own markup language and yeah. here we are. and it’s actually fun??

like it has a real preview, you edit the .slint file and it just updates, no recompiling the entire universe to nudge one thing.

after the Dioxus months this feels illegal.

anyway before touching any actual UI I made penumbra-app, which is NOT the UI, it’s the brain. a Universe struct that holds the graph + storage + event bus and does all the note stuff: create, save, delete, restore on open, persist after every change. the whole point is it doesn’t know Slint exists. or Dioxus. or anything.

it just… runs the app, and whatever draws on top pokes it and listens for events. so if I rage-quit Slint in three weeks (I won’t! probably.) the brain doesn’t care.

the actual Slint crate (penumbra-ui) is barely anything yet. cargo.toml, a build.rs because Slint compiles the markup at build time, a main, one app.slint. it’s the hello-world stage. but it launches! natively! no webview! I cannot stress how nice it is to not have a webview.

oh also storage stuff got nudged, everything lives under a Penumbra/ folder now instead of just yeeting files into the shared app-data dir like a menace. and added a with_dir() so tests stop writing to my real data. speaking of, wrote a pile of Universe tests: make a note, drop the whole universe, reopen from the same folder,
is the note still there? yes.
edit it, reopen, still edited?
yes. delete it, reopen, gone? gone.

persistence actually persists, turns out.

months since the last commit lol. I saw the date and just sighed. but the backend was sitting there perfectly fine this whole time waiting for me to stop fighting UI frameworks, and now I’ve got a clean core library and a toolkit that doesn’t actively hate me! Gasp.

good place to be back :3