Philosophy
The entire Slowshell philosophy is about not doing unnecessary work. Therefore; it's architecture leans towards being update-based so that things only refresh when they absolutely need to.
You see, I wanted slowshell to do little to no work when idle, and when it does work, I wanted it to only do work on paths that require that work. Basically, I didn't want something to wake the whole shell up and update components it doesn't need to: for example, you wouldn't want changing a workspace to update the battery status, so the only one you want to do real work remains only the workspace indicator, or whatever is related.
To sum it up, work is dependent on who needs to work for an event.
I see, what else?
I am also a lover for software that allow imaginations to run wild; Not having some API that does something in the application, but applications that have little platforms within while respecting that application's boundaries (for example, you probably wouldn't want your email client to run doom).
So plugins were guaranteed from the start, that's part of why I made slowshell, because having plugins could, not only allow others to actually build their own shells, but also have opinionated application outside the base shell for those who would like it a clean slate.
The decisions
A few of the decisions I made were these:
- using iced for ui
- using toml before I decided to go for KDL instead
- using native plugins because sandboxing didn't sound right for a shell
- using abi-stable instead of using C-ABI plugins
That's it, for any other technical details, you can read about in here.