Beryl.md: A Journey Towards Building an Extensible Todo List App

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2023-05-25 15:00:02

Hello! It’s been about six months since I had the initial idea for Beryl. I’ve been having a blast working on bringing it to life, but almost none of it is worth anybody actually trying to use. So you get words instead! This is part update, part design document.

The weekend after my initial concept, I threw together a go library that could parse a file with Beryl tasks. It’s very brittle, but a good-sized test suite let me throw something together that tested my ideas. All it does is take a text file and returns an object hierarchy of tasks. It fully crashes if it encounters a parsing error, so it’s not my favorite thing ever!

BubbleTea is awesome, but gosh proper TUI development is hard! I think it would be entirely impossible without BubbleTea, but the process didn’t really mesh with my brain. I learned a lot, and I’d love to revisit this with a more robust parser. But it was time to move on to a GUI.

As much as I would love to learn the true native language for all of those platforms, I have no desire to! I love hybrid technologies, so my next step was to find tech that would both accomplish my goals and be fun to work on.

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