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electron-guide.md

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Intro

Please read Electron's Quick start. The rest of this document assumes you've read it.

Electron App Layout

Light Table's Electron app has the following layout:

deploy/core/
├── package.json
├── main.js
├── LightTable.html
├── node_modules/
└── ../../src/

Description of each file/directory:

  • package.json - This is a manifest file that sets the name, version and the js file to start the main process. To learn more about how Electron uses it read the source.
    • Our package.json has an additional 'browserWindowOptions' key. This key is used by the main process to set BrowserWindow options. This is placed in package.json because it is a declaration of an Electron app, like the rest of the file.
  • main.js - This is the heart of the main process. All GUI interactions run through this file. This also handles the CLI. Recommend understanding this file.
  • LightTable.html - This is the web page we see as our editor. It lives in the renderer process.
  • node_modules - These are node packages used by the renderer process. These are described in this doc
  • ../../src/ - This is the ClojureScript code that is run in the renderer process. It is loaded by LightTable.html.

Miscellaneous Pointers

  • Communication between main.js (main process) and ClojureScript code (renderer process) happens through ipc messages and remote objects.
    • For example, when a window receives a focus event, the main process sends an ipc message on the "app" channel to the renderer process. The renderer process receives that message and invokes a :focus trigger on the app object.
    • IPC messages between the main and renderer process can be logged in the terminal with $IPC_DEBUG e.g. IPC_DEBUG=1 script/light.sh.
  • We use webview for our browser.
  • We use remote-debugging-port to do browser eval.

Additional Links