Hackety Hack

Hackety Hack is a programming starter kit: an editor with helpful coding tools, written by _why the lucky stiff's community on top of Shoes.

It stopped working because Shoes stopped working. The old README pointed at Shoes 4, a JRuby rewrite that never got far enough to run Hackety Hack.

This branch takes a different route: Clogs, a Shoes implementation built on libui that runs on plain CRuby.

Clogs

clogs/ is a standalone gem — Shoes, worn over libui. No browser engine, no JVM, one small native dependency that ships prebuilt for Linux, macOS and Windows.

require "clogs"

Shoes.app(title: "Hello", width: 400, height: 200) do
  para "Hello, ", strong("Shoes"), "!", size: :title
  button("Push me") { @note.replace "Aha! Clicked." }
  @note = para "Nothing pushed so far"
end

It takes the Shoes DSL from Lacci (the display-independent half of Scarpe) and implements the display side itself: layout, text, painting, widgets and input. See clogs/README.md and the tested feature matrix in clogs/docs/libui_shoes_coverage.md.

Where the port stands

The IDE runs. ruby hacketyhack.rb opens Hackety Hack: the splash animation, the side tabs, the Home tab and its artwork all render on Clogs. rake boot proves it headlessly and CI runs that on every push.

bundle install
ruby hacketyhack.rb    # the IDE
rake samples           # the bundled Shoes programs, headless
rake boot              # IDE smoke test

Six of the twelve Shoes programs in samples/ run unmodified — Clock, Scribble, Pong, Duel, Follow and Arcs — exercising animation, clear/redraw, mouse input, art drawables and styled text. rake samples lists the rest rather than hiding them; they need Shoes 3 off-screen image canvases, download, or Hackety Hack's turtle widgets.

Getting here meant fixing real divergences between Shoes 3 and Lacci, all in lib/compat/shoes3.rb:

• Slot-block scoping. Lacci instance_evals slot blocks into the app and documents this as a known incompatibility. Hackety Hack's tab classes set @content inside slot.append { ... } and read it back later, so those ivars were landing on the app. Shoes Classic semantics are restored: the block keeps its own self, and Shoes DSL calls forward to the app.
• Widget blocks. Lacci hands a Shoes::Widget's block to the widget's initializer and then runs it again as the widget's slot body (its source marks this "# Do Widgets do this?"). Hackety Hack's widgets take that block as a click handler, so it fired at creation time.
• Trailing-hash arguments, window, dialog, chained hover/leave/click, move/displace, finish, class-level style, Shoes::COLORS, Shoes::Mask, positional shape/oval origins, negative arc angles, and para.cursor.

Hpricot, which has not built since 2010, is replaced by a Nokogiri shim, and the dead hackety.org version check no longer crashes startup.

Still rough. The editor tab is not usable yet, the online features point at a server that no longer exists, and large images are expensive to draw — see the note on libui and bitmaps in the coverage matrix.

Development

bundle install
rake samples                                  # the Shoes samples, headless
cd clogs && rake test                         # Clogs' own suite
ruby -Iclogs/lib clogs/examples/kitchen_sink.rb

On a headless machine, prefix GUI commands with xvfb-run -a.

Licence

See LICENSE. Clogs is MIT.