Exhibitor Progress Update 2
v1.1
Firstly, catch-up links:
Hey there 👋 I hope you are all having a lovely festive season. I’m happy to introduce something special - Exhibitor v1.1.0:
Quite a lot happened over the last 9 days, so let’s jump in with the work:
Left-hand-side Navigator
I rewrote Exhibitor’s LHS navigator to be identical to VSCode’s in look, feel, function, and underlying architecture. The nodes of the directory structure are a simple flat list with programmatic indentation:
This greatly improved performance and code simplicity, resulting in a slick experience that I’m very happy with for now.
UI Customization
I made all edges resizable and all “side-bars” collapsible. Part of this is to simply allow the user to adapt Exhibitor to their monitor size and preferences (e.g. text size). The other more subtle part of this is the beginning of a large set of planned functionality in Exhibitor around allowing the user to very powerfully test the responsiveness of their components. The end-goal for this is the perfect blend of…
The simplicity of Ladle:
…And the functionality of Chrome’s/Firefox’s dev-tools:
CLI Beautification
Exhibitor CLI has needed some love for a long time. There was no color to highlight points of interest. There was no real error handling. Config-parsing was inconsistent. Etc.
All those problems are now gone:
Beautiful output:
Consistent and informative error handling:
Robust configuration parsing, teaming up with that new shiny error handling:
Onboarding
Tools like Exhibitor are notorious for being a fuss to setup. Anyone who has used a tool like Storybook should be aware that there is often wizardry, magic, even dark arts required to simply get a component to show up and get to flow going. One of my goals with Exhibitor is that this initial bootstrapping step will be simple, accessible, and limited to one or two entries in a terminal.
So this week I created exhibitor init. This is a new command of the Exhibitor CLI that bootstraps a new directory for use with Exhibitor (which itself is only a very small number of steps). I can even show it here:
I tested Exhibitor’s current onboarding journey with some of my non-technical friends (who don’t know much about all this “software” gobbledygook), and they were able to get Exhibitor up and running in under a minute!
There is still more work to do on this front. My end-goal is some sort of blend between create-react-app, npm-init, and other similar CLI commands.
I hope you enjoyed catching up with what I’ve been doing. Happy holidays everyone. The next update will be after Christmas.
If you would like to support my work or otherwise like what I’m doing, you can show your ❤️ by giving Exhibitor a ⭐.