Contributing

...is welcome!

Issue tracking / Repository

From issues to wikis: everything is on GitHub

Linting / Formatting

Everything is formatted with dart format (no flags) and linted with dart analyze (see rules). Both are enforced by the CI.

Translations

Time ago strings

Strings such as "About one hour ago" or "~1h" are localizable. We inherit a set of ready translations from github.com/andresaraujo/timeago.dart/messages and provide our own in lib/l10n/timeago.

To contribute time ago strings please send a PR containing a class that implements timeago.LookupMessages. Place it under lib/l10n/timeago with an appropriate name (locale tag) and finally register it in main_common.dart in the _setupTimeago function. Each locale can have a normal (for example "About one hour ago") and a short (for example "~1h") variant, there are registered separately.

Architecture

Lemmur is written in Dart using Flutter. To communicate with Lemmy instances lemmy_api_client is used.

State management

MobX + Provider is used for global state management, flutter_hooks is used for local (widget-level) state management. StatefulWidgets are avoided all together and any state logic reuse is moved to a custom hook.

Project structure

(relative to lib/)

hooks/: reusable state hooks
l10n/: files with localized strings and localizations tools
pages/: fullscreen pages that you navigate to
stores/: global stores
util/: utilities
widgets/: reusable widgets; building blocks for pages
main_common.dart: entrypoint of the app. Sets up the stores, initializes the themes, renders the first page

Things to keep in mind

Be aware that Lemmur supports arbitrary Lemmy instances, don't hardcode instance urls
Remember that a user is not obligated to be logged in, contributed widgets should handle this case

Lemmy API

LAC (Lemmy API Client) is used to communicate with Lemmy backends, more information can be found here.

For React developers

If you come from a React background Flutter shouldn't be anything hard to grasp for you.

Components are called 'widgets' in flutter
flutter_hooks is a React hooks port to flutter. Though you will come to see that flutter_hooks are not as powerful
There is no CSS. You compose your layout with other widgets and style them by passing properties to them
There are no functional components, everything has to be a class
Creating wrapping widgets is not as nice as in React, there is no { ...props }. In flutter you need to pass each argument one by one

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