Add API to control from the outside

[Xenira]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

#22 discusses different ways of changing the ding to ding after n characters.
While using different keys to determine the current column this will always have a bit of inaccuracy.

I propose to add a way to control daktilo from the outside to give editors the opportunity to report the current cursor position and/or line length.

Maybe other use cases for controlling the app from the outside might also arise in the future (e.g.: changing preset based on current project/application).

Describe the solution you'd like

I'd like to implement an api allowing external applications to control the running daktilo process.

For this one could use different ways of communication:

1. (g)RPC
2. Pipes
3. Rest API

My prefered solution would probably be gRPC. While named pipes would be a really simple way of handling this the other methods probably scale a lot better.

The api should probably be disabled by default and can be enabled using the config file.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Programs could include a lib version of this project. This would have several drawbacks:

1. If multiple programs do this each would be playing their own sound causing overlap
2. Config per program would be required
3. Programs would need to update daktilo lib and might have different versions (unless dynamic linked, but that would just add further complexity and breaking changes would break the libs till update)

Additional context

I'm investing way to much time into this and prob. over-engineering this. Please feel free to tell me if I am going too far 😜

[Xenira]

Another alternative would be to use daktilo as a lib in something like a daktilo-server project.

That would keep this project clean and allow someone to install the server version if they want the additional functionality.

[Xenira]

@orhun any preferences on this? I have the basics done using gRPC (116f94b has the poc), just need to refactor based on how you would like this to be integrated.

• If this should be integrated in this project ill add config options and add proto to this repo
• Otherwise ill create a new daktilo-server repo that handles the gRPC server and proto. In that case I might need to create a MR to allow me to send custom events

[orhun]

Hey, thanks for creating this issue, and no, sounds like a good feature rather than an overengineered thing :D

My prefered solution would probably be gRPC. While named pipes would be a really simple way of handling this the other methods probably scale a lot better.

I would honestly go for the pipe implementation since it is more low level and a bit easier to communicate from simple processes. But I'm not against gRPC, it is also a fine approach. Will definitely want to support pipes in the future based on how easy it will be the gRPC implementation will be though.

I have the basics done using gRPC

That's great!

I think we can have the server in this repo by converting the project into a workspace (so we will have 2 workspace members - daktilo & daktilo-server). How does that sound?

[orhun]

I also think we should have an example for showing what you can achieve with the daktilo API. Maybe we can somehow make #22 happen?

[Xenira]

I think we can have the server in this repo by converting the project into a workspace (so we will have 2 workspace members - daktilo & daktilo-server). How does that sound?

I would split it into 3 while we are at it. Cli, Lib and Server.

Ill look into a convenient way to allow both pipe and gRPC.

[orhun]

Sounds good!

[Xenira]

Added a repo for simple nvim plugin here: https://github.com/Xenira/daktilo.nvim

Already started to add the server here: https://github.com/Xenira/daktilo/tree/daktilo-server

Will wait for #66 to be ready before going further though. Atm this setup won't do anything (except printing an error message i guess) and the server code is not integrated yet.

Edit: Probably also need to create a shared / common crate to avoid circular dependencies.

[orhun]

Damn that looks awesome, definitely look forward to using it in my setup :D

I added some comments in #66, will try to get to your feedback rather quickly so that we can move forward with the server part.