CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

First of all, thanks for considering contributing to this project. All contributions are welcome, whether they are bug reports, documentation improvements, feature requests, or pull requests.

If you're not sure where to start, take a look at the hot topics section for some ideas on what you could work on.

Getting started

Prerequisites

These are pretty much the only things you need to have installed on your machine to get started with contributing to this project:

• the Rust toolchain installed on your machine
• any working version of Git

Forking the repository and setting up the project

1. Click on the Fork button at the top right corner of the repository page to create a copy of the repository to your GitHub account.
2. Clone the forked repository to your local machine by running the following command in your terminal:

   git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/television.git

3. Navigate to the project directory and set up the upstream remote by running the following commands:

   cd television
   git remote add upstream https://github.com/alexpasmantier/television.git

4. Create a new branch for your feature or bug fix:

   git checkout -b <branch-name>

5. Make your changes and commit them to your branch:

   git add .
   git commit -m "Your commit message"

6. Push your changes to your forked repository:

   git push origin <branch-name>

7. Create a pull request by navigating to the original repository and clicking on the New pull request button.

Building the project

Before anything else:

make setup

To run the application in debug mode while developing, with the ability to see logs and debug information:

make run

Accessing the Logs:

The logs are written to a file called television.log in a directory that depends on your operating system / configuration:

Platform	Location
Linux	$XDG_DATA_HOME/television/television.log or $HOME/.local/share/television/television.log
macOS	$XDG_DATA_HOME/television/television.log or $HOME/Library/Application\ Support/television/television.log
Windows	{FOLDERID_LocalAppData}\television\television.log

To build the project in debug mode, run the following command in the project directory:

make

or

make build

To build the project in release mode, run the following command in the project directory:

make release

Formatting the code

make format

Linting the code

make lint

Running the tests

make test

Project structure

The project is laid out in several rust crates that are organized in the following way:

• television: the main binary crate that contains the CLI application
• television_channels: a library crate that contains the channel implementations
• television_derive: a library crate that contains the derive macros used in the project
• television_fuzzy: a library crate that contains the fuzzy matcher
• television_previewers: a library crate that contains the previewer implementations
• television_utils: a library crate that contains utility functions and types used in the project

Contributing a new channel

Channels are just structs that implement the OnAir trait.

As such, channels can virtually be anything that can respond to a user query and return a result under the form of a list of entries. This means channels can be anything from conventional data sources you might want to search through (like files, git repositories, remote filesystems, environment variables etc.) to more exotic implementations that might inclue a REPL, a calculator, a web browser, search through your spotify library, your email, etc.

When contributing a new channel, you should create a new module in the television_channels crate with a new struct for your channel that implements the OnAir trait.

// crates/television_channels/src/channels/my_new_channel.rs

use television_channels::channels::OnAir;

pub struct MyNewChannel;

impl OnAir for MyNewChannel {
    // Implement the OnAir trait for your channel here
}

You should also add your channel to the TelevisionChannel enum in the television_channels crate.

// crates/television_channels/src/channels.rs

#[derive(ToUnitChannel, ToCliChannel, Broadcast)]
pub enum TelevisionChannel {
    // Other channels
    MyNewChannel,
}

TODO: document transitions between channels and previewers

Hot topics

Here are some ideas for contributions that would be very welcome:

• Customization:
  • allow users to customize more of the UI (UI colors, layouts, etc.)
  • allow users to customize the behavior of the application (e.g. the default channel, fuzzy matching constants, channel heuristics, etc.)
• Channels:
  • new channel ideas:
    • shell history
    • git (commits, branches, status, diff, ...)
    • remote filesystems (s3, ...)
    • kubernetes resources (jobs, pods, deployments, services, ...)
    • recent directories
    • makefile commands
    • etc.
  • add more tests for existing channels
• Previewers:
  • new previewer ideas:
    • previewing text in documents (pdfs, archives, ...)
    • previewing images (actually already implemented but commented out)
    • remote files (s3, ...)
    • etc.
  • add more tests for existing previewers
• Documentation:
  • add more technical documentation to the project
    • general design of the TUI application
    • design of channels, previewers, transitions, etc.
    • how to contribute a new channel, previewer, etc.
  • more docstrings in the code
• Performance:
  • working on reducing coupling between the different crates in the project
  • working on reducing the number of allocations and copies in the code
• Project:
  • polish project configuration:
    • CI/CD
    • code formatting
    • linting