I want to help develop GPUI

[bhh32]

How Do I Start Helping with GPUI?

I would like to help work on and advance GPUI as a Rust GUI framework/library. I know that currently it is tailored towards developing Zed, but I believe there are some improvements that I can help make.

What would I like to do?

I'd like to help make new components and possibly re-vamp the ones that currently exist so that they are more general developer friendly.

Have I done this before?

I have been helping with System76's libcosmic GUI framework, and actually redesigned and implemented the SpinButton widget. I simplified the original API, made it more closely match the rest of the Iced inherited widgets, and added a Vertical Spin Button Variant.

Why do I want to do this?

Because I enjoy the work, love how Zed works by default, and think that having multiple GOOD GUI frameworks in Rust will help developers move towards using the language. I'm a big secure development and open source advocate, and I want more developers to have a good experience so they will transition to making safer desktop software.

[ConradIrwin]

@bhh32 yay! we'd love to have help making gpui better and used more.

The way it's (supposed to be ;)) structured right now is that:

• gpui has the low level primitives
• The ui crate has the components that are used in Zed

If you want to build a new component library, I think that could (and maybe should!) happen without too many changes to GPUI.

That said, we'd also love PRs that fix issues in the gpui core. A good example of some things like this are:

• gpui: Update Bounds, Point, and Axis to be serializable #21783
• Fix closest_index_for_x to get correct offset when only 1 char #23603

For fixes to Zed's ui components, there'd be a bit more pushback because we (@iamnbutler, @danilo-leal) care a lot about how Zed looks and feels. But we'd still love help making Zed look better.

If you want to work on larger changes it'd be best to pair with someone on the Zed team, so either open an issue asking for help, or chat in discord and we can try and make that happen.

[bhh32]

@ConradIrwin, I'm so glad that you guys are allowing me to participate. I'll take a look at those issues, and see what I can do. Also, it makes me extremely happy to hear you care how the UI elements look and feel for Zed. I'll also be reaching out on Discord for help figuring out where to make my changes for an issue that was raised on Zed and the completion suggestions, #23526. I figured this would be a good issue to accomplish to learn about the codebase of Zed and get my feet wet.