UI TIME!

This is my first time using Tauri! As I’ve learned with a previous project, UI and Rust are still a bit iffy, sadly.
Tauri effectively parallels Electron while offering much better performance, especially as you still use Rust for the backend while allowing the ease of use of HTML + CSS + JS/TS for the frontend! It uses native WebViews instead of Chromium, which gets rid of one of my biggest frustrations with Electron, that being including and running a whole browser for what’s often a single page.

Of course, this is, uh, maybe is not the best project to showcase how great those features are considering there is effectively one (1) main feature here (lol), but this is a learning experience and an excuse to continue more Rust!

I’m adding UI because running from the terminal is not the best UX, and this will make it easier to change the config (which you couldn’t do before after starting!) and handle everything more gracefully.

I will say that, so far, the developer experience with Tauri has felt great. Automatic hot reloading is enabled by default on both the TypeScript frontend AND the Rust backend (which will auto-rebuild), super neat! Getting everything set up with Nix was… less great, but not Tauri’s fault.
I also chose to use React for this project, as it’s been quite some time since I’ve really worked with it.

Oh, yeah, also I made a logo in Aseprite! I mainly needed this for a tray icon. Modeled after the one and only Logitech C920 PRO HD Webcam, with its glorious (read as: bad (read as: loud = funny)) microphone.

Now that the project has been refactored for Tauri, I need to port the old code to the new “backend”. I’ll build the config UI around this once that’s done!

Also, Tauri actually has a global shortcut plugin, so I can replace rdev with this for a (hopefully) less janky handling system.
(it’s awfully hard to find info about global key handling, probably because that’s misused for malware more often than not…)