image-sorter patches

image-sorter is a smart program that lets you organize your images.

You give it a couple of directories to look for images in, and some alternative directories those images should move to. When viewing a “to be moved” image inside the program window, you press a shortcut for the best matching output directory, and move on to the next image.

Besides having a smart way of configuring the bindings to the output directories, it also persists the “move” commands in a shell file, for you to inspect before executing it. This is dry run being builtin and the default, and it’s so smart to me.

I tried adding a couple of patches, and luckily for me, the author was very friendly and accepted them:

• fix: Guarantee key mapping sort order
• fix(path): Expand ~ (tilde) in target paths
• feat(delete): Delete an image with backspace
• feat: Recurse into target paths if -r is given
• chore: Decorate errors with useful information
• fix(filetype): infer after checking file ext
• feat: Try to shorten directory to fit into preview

Besides some very small contributions at work, these are the first patches I’ve written in Rust. Last time I tried writing rust with vscode-out-of-the-box settings, the process was very slow (auto completion and type checking took very much time, not ideal when coding). For this size of project, the tooling was super quick, so I could just enjoy the nice things about Rust.

Some things to keep in mind for the next excursion with Rust:

• Don’t overuse the catch-all _ in pattern matching. When adding new (for example) enum cases, you want to get compiler errors to fix.
• Use linters. cargo fmt --all -- --check and cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings were used in this project, and they offer good hints à la “yes, your code compiles but this is more semantic”.
• structopt was nice for CLI parsing, I’m sure clap is good, too.
• The dependencies in rust are so many and so small (and I added more of them 🙈).

And also, a debugging experience:

I wanted to add a feature for looking through folders recursively for images. Once the code was written, and I tested it, the program just died. This was due to the alignment of some nice error conditions:

1. “Is it an image or not” was checked by file type and nothing else.
2. The directory being looked through, contained node_modules somewhere in the file tree. One of those node_modules contained an invalid image file (basically echo hello>a.jpg) as a test case. Because, of course, having a dependency in node means importing the whole repository.
3. The TUI library code swallowed error messages, in order to control what’s rendered by the client.