Linux Mint Developer Guide

[xenopeek]

If you want to help develop Linux Mint, you’ve come to the right place! The Developer Guide explains how to get started with development, what the Linux Mint projects are and how to build them.

To read it on your computer click: https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readt ... en/latest/

On your phone or tablet scan this QR code:

[rene]

Thanks for that. Just as request and clearly dependent on what's available...

I more or less for the fun of it did a Cinnamon applet some time ago and remember I back then had to do quite some digging to find any sort of even halfway current Cjs documentation. Few days ago I in response to a forum question thought of doing another one and still had that same issue; scrounging around /usr/share/cinnamon/applets works to a degree but I still feel is highly suboptimal.

There is/was (can't at the moment even find it...) an introduction to the basics of Cinnamon applets but that was even then already old and in any case not nearly detailed enough as to actual Cjs possibilities, which then tends to mean you find only Gjs documentation, but without clear indication to anyone who doesn't closely follow development (and/or Javascript at all...) what is and what is not relevant, cinnamon-canonical or -preferred.

Given that I want/need the documentation in the first place I do not know but if it is an option to e.g. from time to time import/freeze/adapt Gjs documentation when (some features of?) Gjs itself is imported from upstream and stick it somewhere very visible, that would be nice. Pardon if I've missed up to date documentation in fact already existing...

[EDIT] Also pardon if I might be more refering to "St" documentation than Cjs which I'm noticing I might. No idea...

[xenopeek]

If you install the cinnamon-doc package you get the Devhelp program in the Programming category of your menu. That has a Cinnamon Javascript Reference Manual. Is that the one you found and not up to date?

[rene]

No, I referred to some online found documentation although that may have been an old version of what you now pointed out. Which I (only) now recall having noticed from this forum before but which had otherwise left my consciousness again. It seems to on a quick glance have the things I was looking for: thanks!

[JosephM]

What you find online and what's shown in Devhelp should be similar unless something isn't updated properly. The intro applet tutorial I think needs to be updated.

There isn't really much in the way of Cjs specific docs outside of just a couple basics of how to access things provided by Cinnamon or GObject introspection. Neither Cjs or Gjs provide an actual -doc package.

[JosephM]

Also pardon if I might be more refering to "St" documentation than Cjs which I'm noticing I might. No idea...

There is St documentation provided as part of the cinnamon-doc package.

[rene]

Yes, had forgotten about cinnamon-doc again. One of the regulars here, smurphos if I'm not mistaken, has mentioned it a number of times as well and I even had it installed as a result. Just the thing I for example recently wanted in the context of browsing applet types (TextApplet, IconApplet, ...).

[Drugwash]

There are quite a few doc packages to install in Devhelp in order to get a little closer to development:

DevHelp packages list

Screenshot from 2021-08-16 18-08-12.png (12.29 KiB) Viewed 9754 times

They can be found in Synaptic.
There's a quite annoying issue of renaming APIs in Cinnamon which makes the documentation only a hint sometimes, at least until one gets accustomed to the renaming patterns.

I had a hell of a couple months learning (temporarily, due to a very bad memory) javascript and Python through that documentation and practical code in other applets/desklets in order to build a working applet: Applet PYE. It's still imperfect but got no more life in me to keep at it. Hopefully certain tricks in its code would help you with your own development.

[JosephM]

As a side note, when it comes to Python, keep this one handy: http://lazka.github.io/pgi-docs/