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My Robotic Mower Woes 2023-05-19 A Brief Background I'm no stranger to robotic lawnmowers. When my wife and I moved into our rural home just over five years ago, we picked up the Husqvarna 450X Automower since I was far too lazy to manually mow my property and the cost was equal to that of a standard riding mower. It was a no-brainer. The Husqvarna 450X (not mine but same model) Fast-forward five years. Everything is still going great with the Automower. Some minor repairs were needed but that was mostly my fault since I was allowing the mower into places it shouldn't have been (ie. root systems and dirt "craters"). Then lightning struck our backyard at the beginning of April this year. The mower was fine, since we stow it away inside for the winter but the charging station, charging brick and perimeter wire we not so lucky... The lightning traveled along the main perimeter wire and went straight to the charging station. Boom. The charging dock was quite literally blown up into a...
over a year ago

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More from Making software better without sacrificing user experience.

Bringing dwm Shortcuts to GNOME

Bringing dwm Shortcuts to GNOME 2023-11-02 The dwm window manager is my standard "go-to" for most of my personal laptop environments. For desktops with larger, higher resolution monitors I tend to lean towards using GNOME. The GNOME DE is fairly solid for my own purposes. This article isn't going to deep dive into GNOME itself, but instead highlight some minor configuration changes I make to mimic a few dwm shortcuts. For reference, I'm running GNOME 45.0 on Ubuntu 23.10 Setting Up Fixed Workspaces When I use dwm I tend to have a hard-set amount of tags to cycle through (normally 4-5). Unfortunately, dynamic rendering is the default for workspaces (ie. tags) in GNOME. For my personal preference I set this setting to fixed. We can achieve this by opening Settings > Multitasking and selecting "Fixed number of workspaces". Screenshot of GNOME's Multitasking Settings GUI Setting Our Keybindings Now all that is left is to mimic dwm keyboard shortcuts, in this case: ALT + $num for switching between workspaces and ALT + SHIFT + $num for moving windows across workspaces. These keyboard shortcuts can be altered under Settings > Keyboard > View and Customize Shortcuts > Navigation. You'll want to make edits to both the "Switch to workspace n" and "Move window to workspace n". Screenshot of GNOME's keyboard shortcut GUI: switch to workspace Screenshot of GNOME's keyboard shortcut GUI: move window to workspace That's it. You're free to include even more custom keyboard shortcuts (open web browser, lock screen, hibernate, etc.) but this is a solid starting point. Enjoy tweaking GNOME!

a year ago 96 votes
The X220 ThinkPad is the Best Laptop in the World

The X220 ThinkPad is the Best Laptop in the World 2023-09-26 The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you're wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of "design". Functionality is no longer important to manufacturers. Repairability is purposefully removed to prevent users from truly "owing" their hardware. It's a mess out there. But thank goodness I still have my older, second-hand X220. Specs Before I get into the details explaining why this laptop is the very best of its kind, let's first take a look at my machine's basic specifications: CPU: Intel i7-2640M (4) @ 3.500GHz GPU: Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Memory: 16GB DDR3 OS: Arch Linux / OpenBSD Resolution: 1366x768 With that out of the way, I will break down my thoughts on the X220 into five major sections: Build quality, available ports, the keyboard, battery life, and repairability. Build Quality The X220 (like most of Lenovo's older X/T models) is built like a tank. Although sourced from mostly plastic, the device is still better equipped to handle drops and mishandling compared to that of more fragile devices (such as the MacBook Air or Framework). This is made further impressive since the X220 is actually composed of many smaller interconnected pieces (more on this later). A good litmus test I perform on most laptops is the "corner test". You grab the base corner of a laptop in its open state. The goal is to see if the device displays any noticeable give or flex. In the X220's case: it feels rock solid. The base remains stiff and bobbing the device causes no movement on the opened screen. I'm aware that holding a laptop in this position is certainly not a normal use case, but knowing it is built well enough to do so speaks volumes of its construction. The X220 is also not a lightweight laptop. This might be viewed as a negative for most users, but I actually prefer it. I often become too cautious and end up "babying" thinner laptops out of fear of breakage. A minor drop from even the smallest height will severely damage these lighter devices. I have no such worries with my X220. As for the laptop's screen and resolution: your mileage may vary. I have zero issues with the default display or the smaller aspect ratio. I wrote about how I stopped using an external monitor, so I might be a little biased. Overall, this laptop is a device you can snatch up off your desk, whip into your travel bag and be on your way. The rugged design and bulkier weight help put my mind at ease - which is something I can't say for newer laptop builds. Ports Ports. Ports Everywhere. I don't think I need to explain how valuable it is to have functional ports on a laptop. Needing to carrying around a bunch of dongles for ports that should already be on the device just seems silly. The X220 comes equipped with: 3 USB ports (one of those being USB3 on the i7 model) DisplayPort VGA Ethernet SD Card Reader 3.5mm Jack Ultrabay (SATA) Wi-Fi hardware kill-switch Incredibly versatile and ready for anything I throw at it! Keyboard The classic ThinkPad keyboards are simply that: classic. I don't think anyone could argue against these keyboards being the golden standard for laptops. It's commendable how Lenovo managed to package so much functionality into such a small amount of real estate. Most modern laptops lack helpful keys such as Print Screen, Home, End, and Screen Lock. They're also an absolute joy to type on. The fact that so many people go out of their way to mod X230 ThinkPad models with X220 keyboards should tell you something... Why Lenovo moved away from these keyboards will always baffle me. (I know why they did it - I just think it's stupid). Did I mention these classic keyboards come with the extremely useful Trackpoint as well? Battery Life Author's Note: This section is very subjective. The age, quality, and size of the X220's battery can have a massive impact on benchmarks. I should also mention that I run very lightweight operating systems and use DWM as opposed to a heavier desktop environment. Just something to keep in mind. The battery life on my own X220 is fantastic. I have a brand-new 9-cell that lasts for roughly 5-6 hours of daily work. Obviously these numbers don't come close to the incredible battery life of Apple's M1/M2 chip devices, but it's still quite competitive against other "newer" laptops on the market. Although, even if the uptime was lower than 5-6 hours, you have the ability to carry extra batteries with you. The beauty of swapping out your laptop's battery without needing to open up the device itself is fantastic. Others might whine about the annoyance of carrying an extra battery in their travel bag, but doing so is completely optional. A core part of what makes the X220 so wonderful is user control and choice. The X220's battery is another great example of that. Repairability The ability to completely disassemble and replace almost everything on the X220 has to be one of its biggest advantages over newer laptops. No glue to rip apart. No special proprietary tools required. Just some screws and plastic snaps. If someone as monkey-brained as me can completely strip down this laptop and put it back together again without issue, then the hardware designers have done something right! Best of all, Lenovo provides a very detailed hardware maintenance manual to help guide you through the entire process. My disassembled X220 when I was reapplying the CPU thermal paste. Bonus Round: Price I didn't list this in my initial section "breakdown" but it's something to consider. I purchased my X220 off eBay for $175 Canadian. While this machine came with a HDD instead of an SSD and only 8GB of total memory, that was still an incredible deal. I simply swapped out the hard-drive with an SSD I had on hand, along with upgrading the DDR3 memory to its max of 16. Even if you needed to buy those components separately you would be hard-pressed to find such a good deal for a decent machine. Not to mention you would be helping to prevent more e-waste! What More Can I Say? Obviously the title and tone of this article is all in good fun. Try not to take things so seriously! But, I still personally believe the X220 is one of, if not the best laptop in the world.

a year ago 123 votes
Installing Older Versions of MongoDB on Arch Linux

Installing Older Versions of MongoDB on Arch Linux 2023-09-11 I've recently been using Arch Linux for my main work environment on my ThinkPad X260. It's been great. As someone who is constantly drawn to minimalist operating systems such as Alpine or OpenBSD, it's nice to use something like Arch that boasts that same minimalist approach but with greater documentation/support. Another major reason for the switch was the need to run older versions of "services" locally. Most people would simply suggest using Docker or vmm, but I personally run projects in self-contained, personalized directories on my system itself. I am aware of the irony in that statement... but that's just my personal preference. So I thought I would share my process of setting up an older version of MongoDB (3.4 to be precise) on Arch Linux. AUR to the Rescue You will need to target the specific version of MongoDB using the very awesome AUR packages: yay -S mongodb34-bin Follow the instructions and you'll be good to go. Don't forget to create the /data/db directory and give it proper permissions: mkdir -p /data/db/ chmod -R 777 /date/db What About My "Tools"? If you plan to use MongoDB, then you most likely want to utilize the core database tools (restore, dump, etc). The problem is you can't use the default mongodb-tools package when trying to work with older versions of MongoDB itself. The package will complain about conflicts and ask you to override your existing version. This is not what we want. So, you'll have to build from source locally: git clone https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-tools cd mongodb-tools ./make build Then you'll need to copy the built executables into the proper directory in order to use them from the terminal: cp bin/* /usr/local/bin/ And that's it! Now you can run mongod directly or use systemctl to enable it by default. Hopefully this helps anyone else curious about running older (or even outdated!) versions of MongoDB.

a year ago 61 votes
Converting HEIF Images with macOS Automator

Converting HEIF Images with macOS Automator 2023-07-21 Often times when you save or export photos from iOS to iCloud they often render themselves into heif or heic formats. Both macOS and iOS have no problem working with these formats, but a lot of software programs will not even recognize these filetypes. The obvious step would just be to convert them via an application or online service, right? Not so fast! Wouldn't it be much cleaner if we could simply right-click our heif or heic files and convert them directly in Finder? Well, I've got some good news for you... Basic Requirements You will need to have Homebrew installed You will need to install the libheif package through Homebrew: brew install libheif Creating our custom Automator script For this example script we are going to convert the image to JPG format. You can freely change this to whatever format you wish (PNG, TIFF, etc.). We're just keeping things basic for this tutorial. Don't worry if you've never worked with Automator before because setting things up is incredibly simple. Open the macOS Automator from the Applications folder Select Quick Option from the first prompt Set "Workflow receives current" to image files Set the label "in" to Finder From the left pane, select "Library > Utilities" From the presented choices in the next pane, drag and drop Run Shell Script into the far right pane Set the area "Pass input" to as arguments Enter the following code below as your script and type ⌘-S to save (name it something like "Convert HEIC/HEIF to JPG") for f in "$@" do /opt/homebrew/bin/heif-convert "$f" "${f%.*}.jpg" done Making Edits If you ever have the need to edit this script (for example, changing the default format to png), you will need to navigate to your ~/Library/Services folder and open your custom heif Quick Action in the Automator application. Simple as that. Happy converting! If you're interested, I also have some other Automator scripts available: Batch Converting Images to webp with macOS Automator Convert Files to HTML with macOS Automator Quick Actions

a year ago 36 votes
Blogging for 7 Years

Blogging for 7 Years 2023-06-24 My first public article was posted on June 28th 2016. That was seven years ago. In that time, quite a lot has changed in my life both personally and professionally. So, I figured it would be interesting to reflect on these years and document it for my own personal records. My hope is that this is something I could start doing every 5 or 10 years (if I can keep going that long!). This way, my blog also serves as a "time capsule" or museum of the past... Fun Facts This Blog: I originally started blogging on bradleytaunt.com using WordPress, but since then I have changed both my main domain and blog infrastructure multiple times. At a glance I have used: Jekyll Hugo Blot Static HTML/CSS PHPetite Shinobi pblog barf Currently using! Personal: As with anyone over time, the personal side of my life has seen the biggest updates: Married the love of my life (after knowing each other for ~14 years!) Moved out into rural Ontario for some peace and quiet Had three wonderful kids with said wife (two boys and a girl) Started noticing grey sprinkles in my stubble (I guess I can officially call myself a "grey beard"?) Professionally: Pivoted heavily into UX research and design for a handful of years (after working mostly with web front-ends) Recently switched back into a more fullstack development role to challenge myself and learn more Nothing Special This post isn't anything ground-breaking but for me it's nice to reflect on the time passed and remember how much can change in such little time. Hopefully I'll be right back here in another 7 years and maybe you'll still be reading along with me!

over a year ago 58 votes

More in programming

Single-Use Disposable Applications

As search gets worse and “working code” gets cheaper, apps get easier to make from scratch than to find.

12 hours ago 3 votes
Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career

I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pushing myself to write more lately because my co-authors and I have a whole fucking book to write between now and October. […]

7 hours ago 3 votes
Desktop UI frameworks written by a single person

Less known desktop UI frameworks Writing desktop software is hard. The UI technologies of Windows or MacOS are awful compared to web technology. What can trivially be done with HTML/CSS/JavaScript in few minutes can take hours using Windows’s win32 APIs or Mac’s Cocoa. That’s why the default technology for desktop apps, especially cross-platform, is Electron: a Chrome browser combined with Node runtime. The problem is that it’s bloaty: each app is a unique build of Chrome with a little bit of application code. Chrome is over 100MB so many apps ship less than 1MB of code in a 100M wrapper. People tried to address the problem of poor OS APIs by writing UI frameworks, often meant to be cross-platform. You’ve heard about QT, GTK, wxWindows. The problem with those is that they are also old, their APIs are not the greatest either and they are bloaty as well. There just doesn’t seem to be a good option. Writing your own framework seems impossible due to the size of task. But is it? I’ll show a couple of less-known UI frameworks written mostly be a single person, often done simply to enable writing an application. SWELL in WDL WDL is interesting. Justin Frankel, the guy who created Winamp, has a repository of C++ code he uses in different projects. After selling Winamp to AOL, a side quest of writing file sharing application, getting fired from AOL for writing file sharing application, he started a company building Reaper a digital audio workstation software for Windows. Winamp is a win32 API program and so is Reaper. At some point Justin decided to make a Mac version but by then he had a lot of code heavily using win32 APIs. So he did what anyone in his position would: he implemented win32 APIs for Mac OS and Linux and called it SWELL - Simple Windows Emulation Layer. Ok, actually no-one else would do it. It was an insane idea but it worked. It’s important to not over-state SWELL capabilities. It’s not Wine. You can’t take any win32 program and recompile for Mac with SWELL. Frankel is insanely pragmatic and so is his code. SWELL only implements the subset of APIs he uses in Reaper. At the same time Reaper is a big app so if SWELL works for Reaper, it could work for your app. WDL is open-source using permissive MIT license. Sublime Text For a few years Sublime Text was THE programmer’s editor. It was written by a single developer in C++ and he wrote a custom UI toolkit for it. Not open source but its existence shows it can be done. RAD Debugger RAD Debugger is an open-source Windows debugger for C/C++ apps written in C by mostly a single person. It implements a custom UI framework based on 3D renderer. The UI is integral part of the the app but the code is well structured so you probably can take just their UI / render code and use it in your own C / C++ app. Currently the app / UI is only for Windows but it’s designed to be cross-platform and they are working on porting the renderer to Mac OS / Linux. They use permissive MIT license and everything is written in C. Dear ImGUI Dear ImGui is a newer cross-platform, UI framework in C++. Open source, permissive MIT license. Written by mostly a single person. Ghostty Ghostty is a cross-platform terminal emulator and UI. It’s written in Zig by mostly a single person and uses it’s own low-level GPU renderer for the UI. You too can write your own UI framework At first the idea of writing your own UI framework seems impossibly daunting. What I’m hoping to show is that if you’re ambitious enough it’s possible to build cross platform desktop apps that are not just bloated 100MB Chrome wrappers around few kilobytes of custom code. I’m not saying it’s a simple thing, just that enough people did it that it’s possible. It shouldn’t be necessary but both Microsoft and Apple have tragically dropped the ball on providing decent, high-performance UI libraries for their OS. Microsoft even writes their own apps, like Teams, in web technologies. Thanks to open source you’re not at the staring line. You can just use Dear ImGUI or WDL’s SWELL. Or you can extract the UI code from RAD Debugger or Ghostty (if you write in Zig). Or you can look at how their implementation to speed up your own design and implementation.

yesterday 2 votes
Logic for Programmers Turns One

I released Logic for Programmers exactly one year ago today. It feels weird to celebrate the anniversary of something that isn't 1.0 yet, but software projects have a proud tradition of celebrating a dozen anniversaries before 1.0. I wanted to share about what's changed in the past year and the work for the next six+ months. The Road to 0.1 I had been noodling on the idea of a logic book since the pandemic. The first time I wrote about it on the newsletter was in 2021! Then I said that it would be done by June and would be "under 50 pages". The idea was to cover logic as a "soft skill" that helped you think about things like requirements and stuff. That version sucked. If you want to see how much it sucked, I put it up on Patreon. Then I slept on the next draft for three years. Then in 2024 a lot of business fell through and I had a lot of free time, so with the help of Saul Pwanson I rewrote the book. This time I emphasized breadth over depth, trying to cover a lot more techniques. I also decided to self-publish it instead of pitching it to a publisher. Not going the traditional route would mean I would be responsible for paying for editing, advertising, graphic design etc, but I hoped that would be compensated by much higher royalties. It also meant I could release the book in early access and use early sales to fund further improvements. So I wrote up a draft in Sphinx, compiled it to LaTeX, and uploaded the PDF to leanpub. That was in June 2024. Since then I kept to a monthly cadence of updates, missing once in November (short-notice contract) and once last month (Systems Distributed). The book's now on v0.10. What's changed? A LOT v0.1 was very obviously an alpha, and I have made a lot of improvements since then. For one, the book no longer looks like a Sphinx manual. Compare! Also, the content is very, very different. v0.1 was 19,000 words, v.10 is 31,000.1 This comes from new chapters on TLA+, constraint/SMT solving, logic programming, and major expansions to the existing chapters. Originally, "Simplifying Conditionals" was 600 words. Six hundred words! It almost fit in two pages! The chapter is now 2600 words, now covering condition lifting, quantifier manipulation, helper predicates, and set optimizations. All the other chapters have either gotten similar facelifts or are scheduled to get facelifts. The last big change is the addition of book assets. Originally you had to manually copy over all of the code to try it out, which is a problem when there are samples in eight distinct languages! Now there are ready-to-go examples for each chapter, with instructions on how to set up each programming environment. This is also nice because it gives me breaks from writing to code instead. How did the book do? Leanpub's all-time visualizations are terrible, so I'll just give the summary: 1180 copies sold, $18,241 in royalties. That's a lot of money for something that isn't fully out yet! By comparison, Practical TLA+ has made me less than half of that, despite selling over 5x as many books. Self-publishing was the right choice! In that time I've paid about $400 for the book cover (worth it) and maybe $800 in Leanpub's advertising service (probably not worth it). Right now that doesn't come close to making back the time investment, but I think it can get there post-release. I believe there's a lot more potential customers via marketing. I think post-release 10k copies sold is within reach. Where is the book going? The main content work is rewrites: many of the chapters have not meaningfully changed since 1.0, so I am going through and rewriting them from scratch. So far four of the ten chapters have been rewritten. My (admittedly ambitious) goal is to rewrite three of them by the end of this month and another three by the end of next. I also want to do final passes on the rewritten chapters; as most of them have a few TODOs left lying around. (Also somehow in starting this newsletter and publishing it I realized that one of the chapters might be better split into two chapters, so there could well-be a tenth technique in v0.11 or v0.12!) After that, I will pass it to a copy editor while I work on improving the layout, making images, and indexing. I want to have something worthy of printing on a dead tree by 1.0. In terms of timelines, I am very roughly estimating something like this: Summer: final big changes and rewrites Early Autumn: graphic design and copy editing Late Autumn: proofing, figuring out printing stuff Winter: final ebook and initial print releases of 1.0. (If you know a service that helps get self-published books "past the finish line", I'd love to hear about it! Preferably something that works for a fee, not part of royalties.) This timeline may be disrupted by official client work, like a new TLA+ contract or a conference invitation. Needless to say, I am incredibly excited to complete this book and share the final version with you all. This is a book I wished for years ago, a book I wrote because nobody else would. It fills a critical gap in software educational material, and someday soon I'll be able to put a copy on my bookshelf. It's exhilarating and terrifying and above all, satisfying. It's also 150 pages vs 50 pages, but admittedly this is partially because I made the book smaller with a larger font. ↩

2 days ago 4 votes
Implementing UI translation in SumatraPDF, a C++ Windows application

Translating user interface of SumatraPDF SumatraPDF is the best PDF/eBook/Comic Book viewer for Windows. It’s small, fast, full of features, free and open-source. It became popular enough that it made sense to translate the UI for non-English users. Currently we support 72 languages. This article describes how I designed and implemented a translation system in SumatraPDF, a native win32 C++ Windows application. Hard things about translating the UI There are 2 hard things about translating an application code for translation system (extracting strings to translate, translate strings from English to user’s language) translating them into many languages Extracting strings to translate from source code Currently there are 381 strings in SumatraPDF subject to translation. It’s important that the system requires the least amount of effort when adding new strings to translate. Every string that needs to be translated is marked in .cpp or .h file with one of two macros: _TRA("Rename") _TRN("Open") I have a script that extracts those strings from source files. Mine is written in Go but it could just as well be Python or JavaScript. It’s a simple regex job. _TR stands for “translation”. _TRA(s) expands into const char* trans::GetTranslation(const char* str) function which returns str translated to current UI language. We auto-detect language at startup based on Windows settings and allow the user to explicitly set UI language. For English we just return the original string. If a string to be translated is e.g. a part of const char* array[], we can’t use trans::GetTranslation(). For cases like that we have _TRN() which expands to English string. We have to write code to translate it at some point. Adding new strings is therefore as simple as wrapping them in _TRA() or _TRN() macros. Translating strings into many languages Now that we’ve extracted strings to be translated, we need to translate them into 72 languages. SumatraPDF is a free, open-source program. I don’t have a budget to hire translators. I don’t have a budget, period. The only option was to get help from SumatraPDF users. It was vital to make it very easy for users to send me translations. I didn’t want to ask them, for example, to download some translation software. Design and implementation of AppTranslator web app I couldn’t find a really simple software for crowd sourcing translations so I wrote my own: https://github.com/kjk/apptranslator You can see it in action: https://www.apptranslator.org/app/SumatraPDF I designed it to be generic but I don’t think anyone else is using it. AppTranslator is simple. Per https://tools.arslexis.io/wc/: 4k lines of Go server code 451 lines of html code a single dependency: bootstrap CSS framework (the project is old) It’s simple because I don’t want to spend a lot of time writing translation software. It’s just a side project in service of the goal of translating SumatraPDF. Login is exclusively via GitHub. It doesn’t even use a database. Like in Redis, changes are stored as a series of operations in an append-only log. We keep the whole state in memory and re-create it from the log at startup. Main operation is translate a string from English to language X represented as [kOpTranslation, english string, language, translation, user who provided translation]. When user provides a translation in the web UI, we send an API call to the server which appends the translation operation to the log. Simple and reliable. Because the code is written in Go, it’s very fast and memory efficient. When running it uses mere megabytes of RAM. It can comfortably run on the smallest 256 MB VPS server. I backup the log to S3 so if the server ever fails, I can re-install the program on a new server and re-download the translations from S3. I provide RSS feed for each language so that people who provide translations can monitor for new strings to be translated. Sending strings for translation and receiving translations So I have a web app for collecting translations and a script that extracts strings to be translated from source code. How do they connect? AppTranslator has an API for submitting the current set of strings to be translated in the simplest possible format: a line for each string (I ensure there are no newlines in the string itself by escaping them with \n) API is password protected because only I can submit the strings. The server compares the strings sent with the current set and records a difference in the log. It also sends a response with translations. Again the simplest possible format: AppTranslator: SumatraPDF 651b739d7fa110911f25563c933f42b1d37590f8 :%s annotation. Ctrl+click to edit. am:%s մեկնաբանություն: Ctrl+քլիք՝ խմբագրելու համար: ar:ملاحظة %s. اضغط Ctrl للتحرير. az:Qeyd %s. Düzəliş etmək üçün Ctrl+düyməyə basın. As you can see: a string to translate is on a line starting with : is followed by translations of that strings in the format: ${lang}: ${translation} An optimization: 651b739d7fa110911f25563c933f42b1d37590f8 is a hash of this response. If I submit this hash with my request and translations didn’t change on the server, the response is empty. Implementing C++ part of translation system So now I have a text file with translation downloaded from the server. How do I get a translation in my C++ code? As with everything in SumatraPDF, I try to do things in a simple and efficient way. The whole Translation.cpp is only 239 lines of code. The core of translation system is const char* trans::GetTranslation(const char* s); function. I embed the translations in exact the same format as received from AppTranslator in the executable as data file in resources. If the UI language is English, we do nothing. trans::GetTranslation() returns its argument. When we switch the language, we load the translations from resources and build an index: an array of English strings an array of corresponding translations Both arrays use my own StrVec class optimized for storing an array of strings. To find a translation we scan the first array to find an index of the string and return translation from the second array, at the same index. Linear scan seems like it would be slow but it isn’t. Resizing dialogs I have a few dialogs defined in SumatraPDF.rc file. The problem with dialogs is that position of UI elements is fixed. A translated string will almost certainly have a different size than the English string which will mess up fixed layout. Thankfully someone wrote DialogSizer that smartly resizes dialogs and solves this problem. The evolution of a solution No AppTranslator My initial implementation was simpler. I didn’t yet have AppTranslator so I stored the strings in a text file in repository in the same format as what I described above. People would download it, make changes using a text editor and send me the file via email which I would then checkin. It worked for a while but it became worse over time. More strings, more languages created more work for me to manually manage e-mail submissions. I decided to automate the process. Code generation My first implementation of C++ side used code generation instead of embedding the text file in resources. My Go script would generate C++ source code files with static const char* [] arrays. This worked well but I decided to improve it further by making the code use the text file with translations embedded in the app. The main motivation for the change was to open a possibility of downloading latest translations from the server to fix the problem of translations not being all ready when I build the release executable. I haven’t done that yet but it’s now easier to implement given that the format of strings embedded in the exe is the same as the one I can download from AppTranslator. Only utf-8 SumatraPDF started by using both WCHAR* Unicode strings and char* utf8 strings. For that reason the translation system had to support returning translation in both WCHAR* and char* version. Over time I refactored the code to use mostly utf8 and at some point I no longer needed to support WCHAR* version. That made the code even smaller and reduced memory usage. The experience I’m happy how things turned out. AppTranslator proved to be reliable and hassle free. It runs for many years now and collected 35440 string translations from users. I automated everything so that all I need to do is to periodically re-run the script that extracts strings from source code, uploads them to AppTranslator and downloads latest translations. One problem is that translations are not always ready in time for release so I make a release and then people start translating strings added since last release. I’ve considered downloading the latest translations from the server, in addition to embedding them in an executable at the time of building the app. Would I do the same today? While AppTranslator is reliable and doesn’t require on-going work, it would be better to not have to run a server at all. The world has changed since I started SumatraPDF. Namely: people are comfortable using GitHub and you can edit files directly in GitHub UI. It’s not a great experience but it works. One option would be to generate a translation text file for each language, in this format: :first untranslated string :second untranslated string :first translated string translation of first string :second translated string translation of second string Untranslated strings are listed at the top, to make it easier to find. A link would send a translator directly to edit this file in GitHub UI. When translator saves translations, it creates a PR for me to review and merge. The roads not taken But why did you re-invent everything? You should do X instead. All other X that I know about suck. Using per-language .rc resource files Traditional way of localizing / translating Window GUI apps is to store all strings and dialog definitions in an .rc file. Each language gets its own .rc file (or files) and the program picks the right resource based on a language. This doesn’t solve the 2 hard problems: having an easy way to add strings for translations having an easy way for users to provide translations XML horror show There was a dark time when the world was under the iron grip of XML fanaticism. Everything had to be an XML file even when it was the worst possible solution for the problem. XML doesn’t solve the 2 hard problems and a string storage format is an absolute nightmare for human editing. GNU gettext There’s a C library gettext that uses .po files. This is much saner solution than XML horror show. .po files are relatively simple text format. The code is already written. Warning: tooting my own horn. My format is better. It’s easier for people to edit, it’s easier to write code to parse it. This looks like many times more than 239 lines of code. Ok, gettext probably does a bit more than my code, but clearly nothing than I need. It also doesn’t solve the 2 hard problems. I would still have to write code to extract strings from source code and build a way to allow users to translate them easily.

2 days ago 3 votes