How do I contribute to this project?

glenreesor / HammerBar

A Windows-Like Taskbar for MacOS

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How do I contribute to this project? #3

Closed dinbtechit closed 4 days ago

dinbtechit commented 4 weeks ago

Hi, I am a software developer. I would love to contribute to this project. But looking at the Package.json there are no dependencies. I am not a macOS developer. But I am trying to understand the architecture of this app and how it integrates with macOS and places the window on the bottom of the screen at all times. Any input would be massively helpful!

glenreesor commented 3 weeks ago

Hello! You're right, the package.json is pretty empty! HammerBar is a "spoon" which gets run by Hammerspoon. Here's how things work:

make sure you have Hammerspoon installed
npm install to get the dev dependencies (mainly typescript and typescript-to-lua)
npm build to transpile to typescript to lua. This will create build/init.lua
create ~/.hammerspoon/Spoons/HammerBar/ and put the init.lua from the build step there
create ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua. Here's a simple one:
```
hs.loadSpoon('HammerBar')
spoon.HammerBar:start()
```
restart Hammerspoon

The way HammerBar works is that it uses the Hammerspoon APIs for:

drawing canvases on the bottom of the screen for the taskbar and buttons
listening for click events
getting a list of applications and corresponding windows

Does that help?

glenreesor commented 3 weeks ago

Hello Dinesh! I've just released a new version. Drop me a note if you have questions or suggestions.

dinbtechit commented 3 weeks ago

Hey Glen, absolutely. I will check it out and let you know. It would be nice to have a brew package for this..

Few things that I am looking for in a taskbar are...

Multi-monitor support
Show notifications for Teams, Slack, Discord, outlook, etc etc right in the taskbar.
Hover over a taskbar item should show window preview
clicking on the taskbar item - should toggle between maximize and minimize
I personally don't care about the start menu. Just a launch pad is good enough for me.

Also, I would like to implement hammerspoon in dart & flutter. I don't know how far that is possible.

glenreesor commented 3 weeks ago

Hey Dinesh,

as you've no doubt seen, HammerBar has multi-monitor support
I took a quick look at the Hammerspoon docs and it has support for notifications, but looks like it's only creating notifications, not intercepting notifications created by other apps (http://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.notify.html)
showing a window preview when hovering a taskbar item isn't in this release of HammerBar, but it looks like this should be possible
clicking a taskbar item -- yep that works :smile:
the heavy lifting for HammerBar is done by Hammerspoon, so if you were to implement Hammerspoon in dart & flutter I suspect it would be pretty easy (relatively speaking) to add the required taskbar functionality and thus not even need HammerBar :smile:

Looking forward to your thoughts about the current implementation.