I used cmus daily for years and loved it. Some time in the past I found a bothersome bug/limitation in it. Looking for a fix,
I realized I was using a very old version. cmus has CI/CD and automatically publishes builds, but they were not available — GitHub deleted them
after a while.
I was feeling brave and decided to git clone and build it myself. Having practically no experience with C/C++,
I found this particularly challenging, but eventually succeeded.
Then, after a while, I upgraded from PopOS to Ubuntu 24, and found the cmus I had built wasn't working anymore.
I tried building again, but couldn't install one apt dependency due to one of them not being available in the repos
set up by Ubuntu. Thanks to the modular nature of cmus, I could run it and listen to music... except for flac, and
that is what I use the most.
I work with JavaScript/TypeScript every day. In this world, I can npm install anything and it'll be contained in the project's structure.
I can even nvm use 16/20/22 to switch between NodeJS versions. If a project has a build step, it's usually no more than npm run build.
Most of the time, things Just Work™.
I find the way these old applications require me to install a bunch of dependencies in my machine just to run the build, and a bunch of others to be able to run the application, absolutely crazy.
So I went looking and found Kronos. Having zero Rust experience, I was able to download and run the binary. No dependencies to install. No nothing.
Then I wanted to dig into the code. With zero Rust experience, I just git clone'ed, cargo run and that was it.
Took me less than 5 minutes to go from not even having cargo or rust (let alone RustRover or any other Rust IDE) installed to
making modifications to the code and running them.
I initially submitted a couple of fixes to upstream Kronos, but later decided I just wanted the freedom to commit and push to main
and break the application if needed, prioritizing speed, fun and the features I wanted over process, quality and community.
This is my fork of Kronos. It is not aimed at being easily consumable by anyone, or customizable. At least not for now. I use Jolteon daily, pretty much all day, and work on the features I want to have, and fix the bugs as I find them.
This is my first Rust application, and I'm learning as I go, so the code can be pretty bad at times. But, so far, I'm amazed by how beautiful a language Rust is. And I don't say this lightly! I've been writing software for 20+ years.