Fun with MATLAB (for school). I've been dogfooding my little browser #Sunstone for a while now, and that includes using it for school. My Linear Algebra course is forcing us to use MATLAB (why not GNU Octave, or NumPy?) and things seemed to be going fine until it came time to export the file to pdf. Press the button, nothing. NADA. I figured it's something to do with Sunstone not being feature complete yet, or a WebKit incompatibility, so I go to open it in Firefox instead.

First I get an error. There appears to be a session running already, and my license only allows one session. Would I like to close the previous session? Sure. The result? An infinite loading screen that never finishes. Ack. Try on Chromium. Same. In desperation I download the Linux installer. I don't really want to install proprietary software on my computer, but I have assignments due. Go to run the installer. It immediately fails with an address boundary error. Nice. It's cool that they decided to support Linux, but apparently they fucking suck at programming and definitely aren't using a memory safe language to write the installer.

I go back, make sure to log out with all three browsers and delete history, cookies, and cache. Log back in with Firefox. It still thinks a session is running. Would I like to close it? Sure. The loading page pops up again. Several minutes later, it fails. Ok, this is progress, it usually just keeps loading forever. This time it's saying that the previous session failed to load, and would I like to open a new session? YES, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES, OPEN A NEW SESSION BY ALL THE GODS AND MONSTERS, I NEED TO FINISH MY FUCKING HOMEWORK!?!?!?!

I seriously hate proprietary software. That was a two hour detour that I really didn't have time for. I don't understand how ordinary people think this is ok or acceptable. I definitely don't understand how people can complain about Linux being hard when this is the sort of shit they are dealing with in the proprietary software ecosystem. Linux is fucking easy in comparison.

#Sunstone #browser grew a vertical tab bar over the past two days. Tabs appear in the first pane in the sidebar. There are a couple of limitations so far. Tabs can't yet be reordered from this pane, and if you reorder your tabs using either the tab overview or the regular horizontal tab bar, the changes will not be mirrored in the vertical tab bar. Both are on the TODO list. Still, progress. This was a feature that I loved from the moment it was added to Firefox, and I was missing it. It doesn't work quite as nicely as the Firefox implementation (yet) in that you can't set the sidebar to automatically expand on mouseover and collapse when leaving it. I'll play around with the design a bit more and see what can be done, particularly since I know how to do mouseover actions in Gtk now.

There was also a bug where downloading a file would open multiple progress bars in the download manager, and also send multiple notifications upon completion. This is now fixed. The clue was that there were as many rows/notifications as there were tabs opened since the program was started. Turns out I was adding a callback to the global network session for each tab as it was instantiated. This is now done per-window instead. Because WebKit shares a common network session for all web views, downloads created in one window will show up in the download manager of every window. I think I can live with that behavior, and it is certainly an improvement over what had been happening.

Some fairly big #Sunstone #browser feature implementations today.

Bookmarks can be displayed at the 'sunstone://bookmarks/' uri. Clicking on the tag buttons for each bookmark card will bring up a page with all bookmarks that have that tag. There is also a search entry, which by default will search within the bookmark's name, alias, description, and url. This doesn't yet work from within a tag page, but that shouldn't take too much of a rafactor to implement.

Because the search is implemented using the 'get' method, the search query is appended to the url. Technically, this could be added as a search engine the same way other search engines are added. I need to start writing some good documentation.

I've learned a lot doing this. One thing I am not, and never claimed to be, is a web designer. But these features require creating web pages on the fly programatically, adding a custom scheme handler to WebKit, and even some css. No javascript so far.

History is going to be implemented in much the same way, but with a lot more search parameters that can be set by the user. Some of the work done so far will support the history page nicely. The handler already breaks the query string down and stores key/value pairs in a hashmap to be passed to the function which generates the page.

There's a fairly significant amount of code cleanup to be done around this last bit of hacking. For instance, originally I had a few different html templates for various uses, but I've knocked that down to one. I'll need to remove the orphans from the repository.

I'm experimenting with a mini titlebar in #Sunstone for when the main controls are hidden. It's just big enough to give you a handle to move the windows around, with the title in the center. Clicking the title beings to the controls and focuses the address bar, hitting escape hides the controls again. So far I like it. If a new user accidentally hides the controls they can get them back with one click. I'll probably add a button on the left to open the sidebar, and some windows control buttons on the right.

Thinking I'll make it configurable, and also add an option to hide it when the widow is maximized.

This comes along with using client side decorations, so I'll be adding widow controls to the existing header bar as well. Might move things around slightly depending on how busy it looks after.

#Sunstone #browser grew a couple of features over the past two days.

- History
This is in the same `places` database as bookmarks. For the time being, there is no interface for browsing history or deleting entries. I've added two settings, max_entries and max_days. Every fifteen minutes a background job runs at low priority to clear and history beyond what those two settings allow. There are a lot of plans for how history is going to be displayed such as grouping visits by host and deleting items from arbitrary ranges of time.

- Address bar completions
Whatever you type into the address bar is now saved and used as entry completions. This was something I was having a hard time living without while dogfooding the browser as my daily driver.

There was a lot of code cleanup and refactoring done in the past couple of days as well. Most of the Sql used to access the places database is stored as snippets in the GResources vfs.

#Vala #Programming #Gtk

https://codeberg.org/jeang3nie/sunstone

I spent a few hours today rethinking the schema for the bookmarks database in #Sunstone . The result is better functionality in less code, which is hopefully a lot less brittle. This database is also going to be used for history, and it's tied in to parsing address bar queries, so it's definitely worth getting it right before going too much further.

Next steps are going to be displaying bookmarks in list form in the sidebar, followed by serving a bookmarks page at the uri sunstone://bookmarks. Since the bookmarks are organized by tags, each tag will be available as a subfolder of that url (eventually).

It was a better day than I expected. My younger son came over and visited for a few hours. He's starting a new job at KSU tomorrow, so he'll be working really close to where I live and we might be seeing a lot more of him going forward.