Windows support

[malarahfelipe]

Hello, there's any plan for windows support on this?
Thanks

[jannis-baum]

Hi! Since I personally don't use or have much experience with Windows I am not planning to do this myself, but I will happily accept a PR that adds Windows support!

That being said, I suspect it should be relatively straight forward to make the necessary adjustments and they shouldn't be too many. My guess is that what doesn't work with Windows right now is

• the viv executable
• detecting the MIME from files at https://github.com/jannis-baum/vivify/blob/f812f2d8b933a782106c8ab977e4604fdbbe5eb7/src/routes/viewer.ts#L14-L15

everything else should already be pretty platform-independent, but like I said, I unfortunately can't test it myself. So if you're interested, go for implementing it! I'll help as much as I can if you have any questions :)

[pidgeon777]

I'm also interested...

[jannis-baum]

I'm also interested...

Hello! Happy to hear that you are interested in Vivify! :)

Like I said, I won't add windows support myself since I don't have any windows machine and it would be impossible for me to maintain it. However, if someone wants to implement it and is ready to maintain it as well, I would happily accept a PR and also provide as much help and support as I can :) So if this sounds like something for you, let me know!

[Tweekism]

@jannis-baum So I'm having an initial look into the Windows thing (good reason to look a little more deeply into the code base while working on that architecture.md job for you).

Seems possible, there is a bit of work invovled.

First hurdle is the way we set the environment variables for dev mode.

For now I've just stripped them out under a new script called win-dev, but we'll need Windows native equivalents.

The mime-type issue you mention above has moved but still exists.

There are node packages that will detect mime types, I assume they are cross platform compatible? Will need to look into that.

And there is a whole bunch of weirdness going on with paths, eg: C:\C:\Users\.... and backslashes instead of slashes, etc.

Here is your mime-type error, as expected, for completeness...

But you can navigate around, look Windowsy stuff!

Then perhaps the biggest issue is as you say the viv app. As a bash script, that would probably just be a rewrite of a separate Windows version would you say? Good news is there is not much going on there, so should be fairly easy?

[jannis-baum]

Hey @Tweekism awesome, thanks a lot! That's great, would you be up for being in charge of Windows development & maintenance?

First hurdle is the way we set the environment variables for dev mode.

For now I've just stripped them out under a new script called win-dev, but we'll need Windows native equivalents.

Interesting! Are you running this on "Windows Windows" or on WSL? I have very little idea what I'm talking about here but I have heard of WSL, maybe that's an option to just develop from there? Or do Windows users usually work directly from PowerShell or something Windows-y?

There are node packages that will detect mime types, I assume they are cross platform compatible? Will need to look into that.

This definitely sounds good. If there is a good Node package it's probably better than running a subprocess from Node for that anyways, even on POSIX.

And there is a whole bunch of weirdness going on with paths, eg: C:\C:\Users.... and backslashes instead of slashes, etc.

Yes, this was expected ^^ What did you do to make that first screenshot work though? It seems like you have a POSIX path there? And also the last screenshots where you navigate around, why does that work and what does the URL say?

Then perhaps the biggest issue is as you say the viv app. As a bash script, that would probably just be a rewrite of a separate Windows version would you say? Good news is there is not much going on there, so should be fairly easy?

Yes, full viv-rewrite for Windows sounds plausible! And yes, not a ton going on, but also not the most simplistic shell script because it has to do some fancy process-y stuff, I don't know if you've already had a look at the code. In case you need help understanding, I can help, but I have no idea how to do the equivalent on Windows ^^

[Tweekism]

Hey @Tweekism awesome, thanks a lot! That's great, would you be up for being in charge of Windows development & maintenance?

Potentially, but I promise nothing yet! Until I can fully scope out how much there is to do 😅

Interesting! Are you running this on "Windows Windows" or on WSL? I have very little idea what I'm talking about here but I have heard of WSL, maybe that's an option to just develop from there? Or do Windows users usually work directly from PowerShell or something Windows-y?

This is on Windows native, I had no idea people are using NeoVim on Windows, so I couldn't tell you what the "average Windows vim" user is doing. I'll @ the users in this post separately and ask them.

Yes, this was expected ^^ What did you do to make that first screenshot work though? It seems like you have a POSIX path there? And also the last screenshots where you navigate around, why does that work and what does the URL say?

If you type in manually a POSIX path it works, but all the links generated by the directory renderer are messed up.

Yes, full viv-rewrite for Windows sounds plausible! And yes, not a ton going on, but also not the most simplistic shell script because it has to do some fancy process-y stuff, I don't know if you've already had a look at the code. In case you need help understanding, I can help, but I have no idea how to do the equivalent on Windows ^^

I've have a cursory glance. I'll definitely take up your offer to explain it a bit when I get to that part.

[Tweekism]

@malarahfelipe @pidgeon777 Hey guys, are you guys able to describe your setup a little bit?

Using Vim/NeoVim I assume? on Windows natively? Or WSL2? or something else?

[Tweekism]

@jannis-baum Ok i quickly hit the limit of my typescripting ability lol.

This works in my simple test project (just normal node.js using yarn init, yarn add mime-types etc.

But when i go to add that in Vivify | ../path.ts I get this

I guess I'm missing some typescript magic? Is it simple or do I need to go do a bunch of reading 😅

[jannis-baum]

Ah, yes, quick TypeScript lesson I guess haha:

On npmjs.com we get information about the typing of the package next to the title. There are three scenarios

1. (best) it has a "TS"-logo so it's natively typed → do nothing and it works in TypeScript
2. (still very acceptable) it has a "DT"-logo so it's not natively type but there are types → do yarn add --dev @types/<package-name> and it works
3. (bad) it has no logo, there are no types → pain

In this case we are in scenario 2:

So you can run yarn add --dev @types/mime-types to install the types as a dev dependency and then TypeScript will have nothing to complain about anymore :)

[Tweekism]

Oh ok, well in that case there might be better packages out there for typescript, of the three I tried this one worked the easiest for me, ok let me go try some stuff and I'll be back :)

[jannis-baum]

Oh ok, well in that case there might be better packages out there for typescript, of the three I tried this one worked the easiest for me, ok let me go try some stuff and I'll be back :)

Having types in a separate package is totally fine, that happens a lot. Nothing to worry about. I would put your subjective assessment of the interface and overall popularity above the criteria of not having native types. If it wasn't typed at all it would be a different story but this one is fine if you like it! Also seems very popular.

[Tweekism]

it is one of the popular ones. mime-type is a fork of it for TS apparently. I ran the command you gave me and I get a different error, but I haven't looked into that yet. I don't want to bother you every 5 seconds lol.