I’ve been working on a small desktop tool called forum-scout — it lets you search multiple Arch-based forums and the Arch Wiki at the same time, from a single window. Results come back sorted by date across all sources, so you can quickly see if your problem has already been discussed somewhere.
Disclaimer: Parts of this tool were built with AI assistance (Claude Sonnet by Anthropic). All code has been reviewed and tested by me.
The only suggestion I can think of at the moment is to lighten the text colour in the “Forum” column for the dark theme, as that dark red is quite difficult to read.
Looks like a really interesting and potentially rather useful project.
Maybe call it forum-scout? There’s already a couple different projects called scout:
aur/scout-bin 0.8.0-1 [+1 ~1.00]
A safe simple readonly TUI to show file changes including git changes
aur/scout-git 1.0-1 [+1 ~0.00] [out-of-date: 2024-01-25] [orphaned]
A CLI interface to Tomboy and Gnote
Besides Garuda, adding the manjaro wiki maybe? As a separate tab besides the forum.
Renaming an pushing to repos sounds nice. Or maybe to AUR so that users of other distros also can use it.
Looking at the source and testing…
Garuda forum is also Discourse, and Manjaro wiki is still a mediawiki so it will literary be a one line change to add them in the “registry”, no new fetchers needed
Maybe it will be a good idea to take out the translations to a separate file, except English which should be built in. Because in the future there will be more translations and it will bloat the code.
p.s. you are fast…i write this and see you added garuda already…
p.p.s. For some reason the suggestions-history did not appear by me. And the first “bug”: when i search for example for “modulejail” scout returns 4 entries in manjaro forum, but the native discourse(forum) returns those 4+2 more (the memes topic for example). I strongly suspect the bug is by discourse, like it has to periodically reindex something and that is what json serves, but just wanted to say it.
p.s. I am an idiot…of course Forum scout resp. the json result is from public source and not logged in and it does not show results from sections not publicly visible like the Member Hub.
Everything works perfectly (didn’t even know there is a RebornOS )
p.p.s. I also like that it respects the system theme and you did not attempt to hardcode styling, which some developers do and is extremely annoying. I was just a bit worried from the screenshots, they were a bit red for me, but with no reason.
I suggest just remove this hash number column and do not bother fixing it. I think the json reports timestamps according to last post (last occurrence of the search term) in topic, and your sorting is according to topic creation (which is what i would prefer).
Alternatively, if you have the time, rename somehow the hash column (last occurance or something), display the timestamp of the last affected post instead of just the ranking and make it sortable column. That would also mean the star for bookmark will have to go in its own column, because right now it is shown instead of the ranking in the hash column.
Indeed, inspecting it closely: the Garuda news topic, started in 2020, mentions modulejail first time on 18.05.26, a little bit before us, and that is why it is number 1.
Another suggestion: on the tabs row, About tab - the usual stuff, version number when introduced, github link, license etc.
What’s wrong with using the distributions’ colors the way the developers intended?
For example, EndeavourOS in purple, Manjaro in dark green, CachyOS in turquoise, Mabox in grass green, and so on. As far as possible…
Or maybe even better, using the logos.
(Hmm, what are the legal implications of that?)
You are partially right. The problem is those color have to have enough contrast. For example mabox will become the third green nuance… undistinguishable. But EOS can be purple indeed.
In any case, matching the colors exactly and keeping them in contrast will be impossible so a compromise should be made somewhere.
Using the logos in that size on a row of checkboxes - a bad idea. Also for the results. It will just be too small. Trust me, you won’t be able to distinguish mabox from manjaro logo in a size of 12 or even 16 pixels.
Replacing the individual checkboxes with a multiple select dropdown (perhaps between the Search text and the Search button controls) might go some way toward freeing more space for actual Search results.
Sounds more like a regression to me. Now i can see whats included with a glance and change with a click.
With a dropdown i will see nothing and require an extra click to change.
)
