December Updates: The Spirit of COSMIC
December Updates: The Spirit of COSMIC

System76 Blog

December Updates: The Spirit of COSMIC
System76 Blog
So they're building a whole complex text editor just for the desktop environment? seems like a weird priority or is the text editor a separate project?
As is often the case with scientific research which many people believe to be pointless, technological innovations aren't always made by achieving the end goal, but through the technologies developed to reach that goal.
Development on COSMIC Edit has lead towards improvements to the cosmic-text library, which is used by many GUI libraries in the Rust ecosystem now. Similarly, the UX designs for the text editor improves the COSMIC interface guidelines, and puts design theories to practice. Likewise, widgets that are necessary for the editor are added to the COSMIC platform toolkit, and existing widgets and features are improved to improve the development experience for applications like this.
No one would want to build applications for a platform that lacks widgets capable of properly displaying, formatting, and editing text. Many would also find it debilitating to have a desktop environment without a text editor preinstalled. Imagine if GNOME didn't have Gedit, and KDE didn't have Kate.
Besides, this is a default text editor for a desktop environment. It is really not that complex. The goal is not to develop an IDE, but a text editor that anyone would feel comfortable using as their default editor on the COSMIC platform.
No one would want to build applications for a platform that lacks widgets capable of properly displaying, formatting, and editing text.
Is the idea that people are only going to be running Iced applications in COSMIC? It feels to me like the realistic option would be that, if COSMIC ever becomes daily-drivable, people would still be using GTK applications with it, at least at first. Might as well use a GTK text editor then? Then System76 could focus on building a text editor after COSMIC is a thing, and COSMIC would hopefully arrive sooner (or even at all - this looks like the path to burnout).
Ah gotcha that makes sense thanks!
That being said I can imagine if KDE didn't have Kate or Konsole or any of that - there's plenty of text editors and Terminals that already exist out there.
Ah I didn't realize COSMIC also comes with its own GUI toolkit but that makes sense, thanks!
I think their RSS feed has a placeholder title for this.
You mean asdf
isn't a good title? /s
I think the bluetooth update broke the ability to use my bluetooth headset.
It wouldn't work on xubuntu but worked on popos now neither..
The text editor that'll be coming with Cosmic looks pretty slick! I've got a loooong way to go with learning rust so maybe I'll take a look at the iced/pop libraries when Cosmic comes out 👀
You can start with the libcosmic repository, and the examples contained within. We're going to work on revamping our design demo application soon, which will be a learning resource for COSMIC application development
Its getting better and better
Awesome! This makes working with multiple workspaces on multiple monitors so much better. For some reason it's missing on all DE's/OS I've tried and only found on some tiling compositors like sway and hyprland.
Great to see the beastly Linux kernel being acknowledged. Happy Holiday!