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Comment on Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

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Is it by any chance an Electron app?

It uses an erlang binding for wxWidgets[1].

[1]https://www.wxwidgets.org/

What for? The Livebook interface is built with Phoenix Liveview.

The window it runs in.

Is this required in some OS and not another? A comment in this thread claims it just uses a browser tab.

It's used for the desktop app, as you can see here[1].

[1] https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook/blob/355527f7e8034e...

Thanks for linking this. I was interested in how it worked but I didn't know enough elixir to get around the codebase by myself. This entry point is very informative for how they managed to do it.

I just looked at the macOS part, but the tl;dr for that is they seem to have compiled the elixir program into a binary and wrote enough swift to manage the lifecycle of the elixir program and signed it and notarized it and prepared it for shipment using CLI via shell! invocations. I didn't look at the windows way of doing things but I imagine it's similar.

No problem! The pr here[1] is also instructive, and here is the one for windows[2]. It seems similar-ish.

[1] https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook/pull/865/files

[2] https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook/pull/1032/files

Since Livebook is a web app, I would assume so.

I just installed it and it actually doesn't use Electron. It's basically just a local web server that runs on your computer, and opens a browser tab in your default browser pointing to http://localhost:60904/

On macOS this is a great app for turning browser web apps like these into dedicated 'apps':

https://www.bzgapps.com/unite

I use it with YNAB

Or Fluid which is free except for a few features which cost $5 (https://fluidapp.com/)

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