Milestone v2.0.0

[Melvin-Abraham]

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🛠	Track this milestone in the next branch

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Prelude

Lately, managing the code-base has become taxing, like adding new features or fixing existing bugs has been quite tedious all due to improperly structured and cluttered code. This milestone is geared at targeting these issues and making it right from the ground-up. New features such as extension support, unofficial routines, internationalization support, themes support, better accessibility, etc. will be baked in during the development.

Changes expected

The following are couple of the changes from developers' point of view that is planned to be implemented.

⚛️ Moving to React Framework

The motivation towards switching to a framework, specifically React is due better structuring of the code-base into components and better state management and making the code more readable compared to plain template strings.

💙 Switching to TypeScript

TypeScript would provide better type safety and intellisense for a better code quality overall. Most importantly, it would keep most of the runtime bugs under check.

⚡ Moving to Vite Build Tool

A build tool that compiles code quickly and is pretty lightweight compared to other counterparts like Webpack. Thanks to ESBuild and native ES modules support, no bundling is required during development which resulting in a productive development environment.

🧶 Switching to Yarn Package Manager

Modern package manager with faster fetches from NPM registry.

🌸 Switching to Sass

Sass would extend upon CSS and provide extra features like nesting, programming constructs, etc.

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💡 Note:

These are some of the changes that would come with v2.0.0 development. The code-base for the same will be accessible in the next branch.

How to build and test?

1. From the root of the project, make sure to fetch the latest changes from the upstream repo (i.e., this repo)

2. Switch to the next branch locally by typing the following command on your terminal

   $ git checkout next

3. Install yarn globally if you don't already have it installed (yarn is mandatory for some commands to work):

   $ npm i -g yarn

4. Install the necessary dependencies by running the following in the project root:

   $ yarn install

5. After the dependencies have been correctly installed, run the dev server:

   $ yarn dev

   This will start a vite dev server and set typescript compiler in watch mode and auto-compile code on changes so that you can make changes to the code without re-compiling the code manually after every change.

6. Start another terminal session and go to the project root. Then, type the following command to start the assistant:

   $ yarn start