A Quick Update on Harper Desktop

This week of Radical Speed Month has been ded­i­cated to putting the dis­parate com­po­nents of the Harper Desktop App to­gether. In other words, we have been in what Shane Wighton would call “integration hell”.

Due to the con­straints put in place by the op­er­at­ing sys­tem and our de­ci­sion to use Tauri, Harper Desktop needed to be split into three main pieces: the high­lighter process, the main Rust Tauri process, and the Svelte fron­tend. We use the main Rust Tauri process as the source-of-truth for all user con­fig­u­ra­tion and state, which meant we needed to or­ches­trate a non­triv­ial amount of com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween it and the other two com­po­nents.

At the same time, I’ve been in­te­grat­ing every­thing (including Jason’s won­der­ful re­vamp of the Harper ed­i­tor) into the main Harper repos­i­tory. It’s been a slow go­ing process, and there is still some work to be done with CI. At the same time, it’s quite sat­is­fy­ing to see every­thing click into place.

Next, we plan to fo­cus our at­ten­tion on the more fit-and-fin­ish pieces of the pro­ject. That means wrap­ping up the im­ple­men­ta­tion of cer­tain parts of the con­fig­u­ra­tion, build­ing out up­dat­ing logic, and cre­at­ing an ac­tual down­load page on our web­site.