How can I compile the compose library and load the local version in my project? I cloned the repo an...

# compose-desktop

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

How can I compile the compose library and load the local version in my project? I cloned the repo and I think I built the library using ./gradlew :compose:assemble I have no idea where to from this though and I did spend a whole trying to make it work. Should I post this in #androidx instead as it's library stuff?

[Big Chungus]

Try adding it as gradle included build and see if it resolves

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Thanks for the reply, I'll be honest I'm a noob to this and especially so with the Kotlin DSL that the desktop compose project generated, it's completely different from what I get on an Android project. How would I that?

[eygraber]

See the README here https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/tree/master/compose

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Oh wow! Thanks a lot, that's exactly what I was looking for.

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

I imagine it'd be super useful to set up a local maven repo right?

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

https://github.com/JetBrains/androidx is where the multiplatform version of Compose lives. There’s a lot of branches in there. Looks like 1.3.0 is getting almost ready at https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/tree/release/1.3.0

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

As for a local repo, the question is what do you need. Are you planning to do local changes to the Compose sources? Are you in a situation without network connectivity and you want all your dependencies available locally? Something else that would need a local copy of Compose?

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Aha! So I should clone this, and not from the one from Google?

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

I want to create a text editor widget

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

OK, you don’t need a local repo for that

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Need multi-cursor support and some other features that I think would be cleaner to modify the library

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

What do you recommend I do instead?

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

I need to modify some internals I think, and I need to have a delegate that handles the multi cursors and a shared edit buffer

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Step back for a second. Do you know that you need to modify Compose sources, or you think you might need to? These are two different things.

And if you are modifying Compose sources, you need a plan to get them upstreamed so that your library / widget is useful outside of your local environment.

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

I don't have to but if I don't the solution is pretty hacky although very simple. But I'd like to try what a tailor made solution would look like. Hmm, is there a use for this in upstream?

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

That’s impossible to answer until you show the usefullness of the code to the project owners

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

I will be using a ropes data structure internally and this would allow for rich text editing with large files but I wonder how much of those features would be considered bloat

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Or maybe I should decouple the ropes structure from the internal and pass strings to the internals, I have no idea what is better but I'd like to test things out first and get familiar with building the library and modifying it first which will take me a few days for sure

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Back to your original question, I haven’t tried local deployment with Compose, but for Skiko it was pretty easy.

./gradlew :skiko:publishToMavenLocal was the only thing to run, and then update your sample module to local at local maven first and use 0.0.0-SNAPSHOT as the version.

Might be different for Compose though

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Ah, the instructions for Compose are at the link that Eliezer posted earlier

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Yup, thanks a lot both of you, this is amazing! And to think that I didn't even clone the correct repo to begin with lol

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

And to the second part. If there are things that “need” to exist in the upstream Compose (common for all platforms, or only desktop) that would enable a rich text editor widget, that’s certainly something that would be worth pushing for.

That’s what I did when I contributed a few patches to Skiko to enable shader based render effects.

Smaller contributions are usually easier to get in, as project owners / maintainers need to think about long term support for any such contribution, and how it plays with other parts of the project - today and in the future.

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

My own personal preference is also to communicate such information ahead of time - in the project bug tracker - to get a feel of what the project owners think about it.

You probably wouldn’t want to spend months of your time working on something that has no chance of being included upstream.

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

If anything I really need the experience as this is completely new territory to me and the project I'm doing this for has no real time limit as it's a long term personal project of mine. Even if I fail to get anything to work this will at the very least be a great opportunity to learn. Upstream quality code would be great but that was not my original intention, and wouldn't be able to do that without rewriting anyways since I am jumping head first into the library. You mentioned Skiko, what are the things you can do with it that you can't do with Composables? I wonder if Skiko (I'm assuming I can use it together with compose) would be an easier solution to my problem?

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Skiko is low level bindings to Skia, which is the rendering engine that puts pixels on the screen

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

I see, if I were to guess I'd say it wouldn't help much as from the initial look the classes of interest to me are probably TextPainter , TextInputService, TextFieldValue, and EditProcessor

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Now I am stuck fighting the build system or whatever is preventing the LSP from working 🙁 How can I get the LSP to work with the compose-jb source? It doesn't work in android studio or emacs with fwcd/kotlin-language-server .

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

kotlin-language-server displays a lot of messages of things being compiled with kotlin 1.8.0, messages look something like 'kotlin.Unit' was compiled with an incompatible version...

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

as for android studio here's a screenshot:

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

The project uses the internal APIs of the Kotlin compiler. - looks like the project author isn’t keeping it up to date with the changes that are going into Kotlin

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

I should add that I am completely new to gradle and large projects' build systems in general so I might be missing something obvious

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Why are you bringing in the language server into the mix?

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

I will try to make this work with android studio if not ig no LSP for this one, for now. The reason I was trying to set-up emacs is due to hardware limitations although I can just about get away with android studio

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Oh, when I say LSP I mean with emacs and not with android studio, but I kind of want intellisense to work on studio otherwise what's the point of using it lol

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

but I can't either to work

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Nothing to do with compose-jb or this channel then

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

It's just with compose-jb that it doesn't work that's why I asked here. Normal compose projects and android apps work fine.

[Xhivat Hoxhiq]

Where should I ask for help instead?

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

There’s #emacs which isn’t super active. Maybe #getting-started to get a bit more exposure. Provide some details on the setup, what works and what doesn’t. Don’t just drop people in the middle of it.