Haiku Contract Report: November 2021 | Haiku Project

Automating and abstracting GUI tasks in an analogous way to shell scripting in the command line would be an interesting development, but the computing world seems to have collectively given up on that so it’ll be a very far reach for Haiku.

But… we already have that, the tool is called hey and it can send messages to running applications to script their interactions.

We also already have out of the box remote desktop, it’s just between Haiku desktops only.

No, I am working on the SPARC port and I was only donated hardware - really it was people happy to get rid of some old machines.

The term “workstation” is just a marketing thing to sell desktop machines at 10x the price. They are perfectly normal machines with a keyboard, mouse and display - the kind of thing you could run Haiku on. And this is what we need by “desktop”, basically: anything that has a keyboard/screen/mouse.

You can try to stretch this definition, but the furhter away you get from this, the less appropriate Haiku becomes for whatever you want to do. At some point you are too far from the sweet spot and hopefully you will find that another OS works better there.

People can do whatever they want, but it is not the goal of the project.

Let’s be serious. We have hey, but no app actually supports it and exposes any useful endpoint. So you’re left manually locating buttons and clicking on them. This makes hey script extremely annoying to write.

We have the foundation for it, but clearly we don’t have the feature yet. Just the same as many other things in Haiku, we have bits and pieces of cool tech and nothing really making use of it.

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I don´t think that is entirely true. You can do quite a bit of appliction scripting on Windows with PowerShell or Windows Scripting Host before that (VBScript and JavaScript). And on Mac OS there are scripting capabilities built in since forever. Yes, I hate the AppleScript language too, but since a few versions of the OS you can also use JavaScript. And in the linux world, desktop scripting isn´t used as much but you can do nearly everything on the commandline.

Getting back to Haiku, that would actully be a cool project to look at all the most important apps and improve their scripting capabilities. Would that be within the scope of a GSOC project?

A redesign of the shortcuts application to use getsuites and offer exposed options would be a good start.

i use console on haiku and ssh

no i use one computer for many users in my home

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Multi-user support