Building a Custom Task Switcher in Zig with AI Assistance to Solve Personal Workflow Issue
By
lorisdev
A five-star bake. Worth schmearing, sharing, saving.
Summary
A developer shares their experience building a custom task switcher called FastTab for the Plasma desktop environment on X11. The project was created to solve a specific personal problem: the built-in task switcher's Gallery view was slightly too slow (taking up to a second to open). FastTab is built in Zig using OpenGL for rendering and runs as a daemon for instant response to keyboard shortcuts. The developer emphasizes they wouldn't have built this without AI tools, as they didn't know Zig beforehand but used AI assistance to create and ship the project.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledFastTab solves a very specific problem: the 'Gallery' view of the built-in task switcher in the Plasma desktop environment is slightly too slow for my liking on X11.
FastTab is a custom task switcher that is built in Zig, uses OpenGL for rendering, and is designed to run as a daemon so that it can respond to keyboard shortcuts instantly.
I would have never built this without AI
It's very likely that this is a problem with an audience of one: users who are still on X11
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