v3

[Aylur]

There are two main goals with this:

• target regular gtk applications that use gjs
• having to maintain less code by removing the gjs and lua lib from the astal repo
  • gjs lib is split into two:
    • core lib is aylur/gjsx which targets gtk3 gtk4 and gnome shell extensions
    • ags lib that has a few more utils and reexports gjsx
  • lua lib will be maintained by tokyob0t
  • I have no plans to work on a python lib anymore but there is a wip by 0x6e6174

What this means for you is a few things:

• fundamental distinction between class and function components
• no more astalify wrappers, JSX expressions handle everything
  • in cases where you need the type of the widget the jsx function can be used directly
  • you can still use the old v1 syntax by simply wrapping widgets in a jsx function call (its a one liner)
• few syntax changes, e.g
  • onSignal -> $signal
  • onNotifyProperty -> $$property
  • setup -> $
  • cssClasses -> class (in gtk4, its just an alias, cssClasses can still be used)
  • className -> class (gtk3)
• Variable API is gone and replaced by State Poll Watch
• new For component which takes care of list rendering (idea taken from Solidjs)
• dynamic rendering is a bit less intuitive with the With component but its a lot more performant
• children property can be typechecked with TypeScript
• and a few more smaller changes

For the cli a few QOL changes

• --gtk4 flag is no longer required, gtk version is inferred from code
• bundling embeds js code into a bash script, which means its no longer needed to manually use LD_PRELOAD
• nix: remove ags.lib.bundle, since it is very easy to write a derivation

TODO:

• update docs
• port examples

[sharmapukar217]

@Aylur hi, eagerly waiting this and #660 to get merged so that i could start creating my first shell. Is there any expected date when these would be merged. I can't control my excitement 🥳

[Aylur]

The latest ETA is around August
It has actually been ready to use for a while now - I’ve already ported my private shell to it. I just haven’t had much time to work on the docs, since this release also involves rewriting the Astal docs.

If you want to try it out

# install dependencies: meson ninja golang gtk4 gtk4-layler-shell
git clone --branch v3 --recursive-submodules https://github.com/Aylur/ags.git
cd ags
meson setup --prefix $HOME/.local build # or `--prefix /usr` for system wide install
meson install -C build

or using nix

nix shell github:aylur/ags?branch=v3#agsFull

[sharmapukar217]

thank you @Aylur. I'll try the new version and if possible i could help for documentation if you need.