Scripting the Haiku GUI with hey

https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/humdinger/2017-11-05_scripting_the_gui_with_hey/

by adamnemecek • 9 years ago

84 46 9 years ago

I played with BeOS when it was still alive, it was light, nice, and fun, and I miss these cute icons, but frankly, I simply don't see the point of reviving it now.

adamnemecek4• 9 years ago

There an insane amount of stuff to be learned from failures. From my understanding, one of the main reasons behind their demise was their business plan. Version for PCs with <256RAM were free, you paid for 256+MB. However BeOS ran so efficiently that no one ever needed 256+MB so few people bought it.

doesnt_know• 9 years ago

wow, if that is accurate, talk about being a victim of your own success....

chipotle_coyote• 9 years ago

While it's been ~18 years, this doesn't at all sound correct to me. BeOS was a commercial product from its very beginning. There were free "developer release" versions, but it was sold as boxed software from R3 on. The last official release, BeOS R5, had a free version called "BeOS Personal Edition," which ran as an app inside Windows or Linux, but the full version of R5 was still commercial, at $69.95 (with an upgrade discount). I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had.

A large part of what did in BeOS was a combination of Microsoft's OEM licensing requirements and Be's steadfast belief that the only path to success was pre-installation on a major PC brand. IIRC, if you offered Windows pre-installations at all, you had to pay for every machine that Windows could be installed on whether or not it was actually installed, and you couldn't offer machines capable of dual-booting. Be concentrated their efforts on BeIA, an "internet appliance" version of the OS, which was dead in the water -- according to a lawsuit Be filed against Microsoft, MS pressured their OEMs not to partner with Be on both BeOS and BeIA. (Microsoft settled the suit for around $24M, IIRC.)

Personally, I think BeOS might have been able to survive as a niche OS if Be had kept their focus solely on it, kept the price competitive with boxed Linux distributions (those were a thing back then), and not been dedicated to the "go big or go home" mantra, but I don't have any inside info to prove (or disprove) that.

outworlder• 9 years ago

Their demise was due to the fact that Apple picked NextStep to base their OS on, not BeOS

agildehaus5• 9 years ago

I don't see the point making such a comment either, yet you made it.

What's so wrong with having multiple options that, in every Haiku thread, someone makes a comment like this?

vadimberman3• 9 years ago

Perhaps because there is an actual point in it?

How many users will this system have at its peak, in your opinion?

mmjaa3• 9 years ago

The same has been said countless times over the decades for things like "Unix", or "Linux" or heck .. even Windows in some quarters.

I don't think there's anything 'wrong' per se with having alternative operating systems - they may not get mainstream approval, but a lot of what is now mainstream started out as fringe/horizon technology. And in that regard, we ought to encourage the fringe to share their discoveries - it does eventually trickle down.

(Disclaimer: you can have my BeBox when you pry it from my cold dead hands..)

peterburkimsher4• 9 years ago

I use AppleScript frequently, and one of the reasons I can't bring myself to move to Linux is because of the excellent API into every app.

Somehow "hey" just doesn't seem to offer the ecosystem that AppleScript does. Even though I really don't like the latest versions of macOS and iOS, I still prefer the old Apple ecosystem to the fragmented platforms of Windows and Linux (or Haiku).

adamnemecek4• 9 years ago

what exactly do you script with it if i may ask?

peterburkimsher4• 9 years ago

Mostly text processors. Bash scripting doesn't always handle Unicode nicely. For Pingtype ( https://pingtype.github.io ) I need data in Chinese. I get that from websites. Sometimes I can download it with curl, other times I need to tell Safari to get the source for me. Language syntax like "every paragraph" and "set applescript's text item delimiters to" are much easier to handle than str.split() and IFS.

File reading and writing are easy. Getting and setting track data in iTunes is easy. Finding selected items in the Finder is easy. I've been using more "do shell script" recently as my knowledge of command-line tools increases.

It's slower to run than other languages, but when I just want a quick one-off script to generate some data, it's faster for me to code it in AppleScript instead of spending hours debugging it in another language.

All my processing for PlinyPedia ( http://peterburk.github.com/pliny ) was in AppleScript - splitting the XML into separate files grouped into folders, naming those folders, moving the footnotes to the bottom and adding links to quickly move up and down, and finally generating a basic iUI interface.

I also wrote scripts to transpose chord progressions to Roman Numerals by looking up the values in a table, select cells diagonally in Excel, and turn my Facebook friends list into an iTunes database. (The iTunes database is URL tracks that trigger a PHP script running locally that opens Safari with the URL - it's basically a bookmarks manager with Smart Playlists. If you can recommend a better database, please do.)

hnbroseph• 9 years ago

the small titlebar seems neat, but the utility seems diminished (i have a smaller target area via which i can grab a window). does the compactness somehow play into other features of the windowing system, or is it just style?

donatj• 9 years ago

I ran BeOS back ~2000 - you could step your windows horizontally and have sort of psuedo-tabs - I think that was the goal.

osxrand• 9 years ago

Much smaller screens made this a useful function for being able to layer windows, as fake tabs

mastax• 9 years ago

You can stack windows together: https://www.haiku-os.org/files/stack.png

excep• 9 years ago

Does anyone know a window manager/desktop environment available for gnu/linux that has this tab-stacking feature?

TheAceOfHearts2• 9 years ago

I haven't tried BeOS/HaikuOS or the hey tool, but I've used the equivalent on macOS. The hey language seems a bit awkward to me, just like AppleScript. A few years back Apple added JavaScript support for OSA, which was a huge win for me. It took me a while to learn how to navigate the docs and use the APIs, but it's proven to be incredibly powerful.

Over time I've built up a small list of utilities for common UI interactions. Here's an example: Get the list of tabs from the frontmost Safari window [0]. Occasionally I'll be researching some topic with a bunch of tabs open, and I want to go work on something else. When that happens I just grab all the URLs in that window and save it in a text file which I re-open later when I want to continue researching the subject.

IMO, the biggest problem I've encountered with OSA scripts (and presumably it also applies to this hey tool) the lack of REPL and inspector. On macOS you can use Safari's dev tools to debug JS OSA scripts, but it's incredibly brittle. Trying to access certain object properties will just cause it to crash, or it might print the identifier of the thing which you're accessing which doesn't add much value.

[0] https://gist.github.com/cesarandreu/8d6ccd70bcac81d1a45941ae...

mmjaa3• 9 years ago

I do something similar with Hammerspoon on MacOS, which allows you to do all of this stuff, albeit with the Lua programming language (which I find far more elegant than anything else) ..

Its gotten to the point that I can't seem to really function on a new MacOS installation without my personal Hammerspoon repo set up .. I'm not sure if thats a positive or a negative result of having such deeply scriptable interfaces, but perhaps it can be looked at both ways.

http://www.hammerspoon.org

tudelo• 9 years ago

I understand not fixing something if it isn't broken, but is there a reason you don't just use a "Bookmark Open Pages" feature? I'm pretty sure it's standard in the big browsers, but definitely on chrome.

TheAceOfHearts2• 9 years ago

I just checked with Safari and it does indeed provide that functionality, and I wasn't aware it was an option.

Honestly, I just find it convenient to get a list of URLs, and dealing with regular text files. Sometimes interfaces are too limiting r slow, and manipulating the list in a text editor ends up being easier.

Another of my use-cases for this is to regroup tabs when I fork into random topics. e.g. Sometimes I end up opening a bunch of tabs that are tangentially related to the subject and I want to move em into a new window or stash em for later.

It's also convenient to grab a manually opened list of URLs in cases where I want to perform some one-off scraping task.

waddlesplash2• 9 years ago

The "hey" tool itself is just a command-line interface to the messaging/scripting system built into the Haiku interface kit (that it's essentially built around). Someone once wrote a module for Python to interface with it as well (although it's ancient and I doubt it works with modern Python: https://github.com/HaikuArchives/HeyModule).

And of course there is the Hey source itself, which you could use as a reference to write a new scripting platform with (https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/bin/hey.cpp).

jlebrech2• 9 years ago

Haiku could be the perfect netbook laptop OS IMHO. no nonsense but still modern.

qubex5• 9 years ago

Having used BeOS back in its halcyon days of the mid-to-late nineties and a as somebody that maintains an active Haiku installation (albeit under VMWare) I have to agree with you.

It is definitely lacking in the browser department (which seems so crucial to most people) but beyond that, it’s a very dependable and responsive OS with absolutely modest hardware requirements.

(I also have a working BeBox 603e 133 MHz but I use it very rarely because I’m very concerned about the health of the IDE HD.)

jlebrech2• 9 years ago

all it needs for regular from out of backpack development use is a browser and docker.

Scripting the Haiku GUI with hey

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