About 4 months ago I bought a new laptop and went with a custom Arch Linux setup using Niri as the window manager. If you’re not familiar, Niri is a scrolling window manager, meaning that it’s a tiling window manager that can scroll past the width of your window. It’s a really great effect and I’ve been loving it.
Due to the way Niri, and franky all tiling window managers work, it causes you to have more terminals open than you would have with a traditional WM. As a result, I find myself using TUIs more often. Creating and closing windows is so causual, fast starting apps like TUIs work better.
In my quest to replace every app I need with a TUI, I found a lot of great things like Impala for wifi management. But I had a bit of trouble finding anything for managing your printers.
So I built Spoolie, a TUI for printer management. It looks like this:
As of right now it’s a very basic printer manager that just allows you to add and remove printers. I’m going to add support for viewing printer jobs, as well as selecting a printer to be the default. I might do more than this if there’s enough interesting in the project.
Spoolie was, of course, vibe coded. It was mostly done in one sitting and it’s the case where I didn’t really read the code all that much until after i’d finished it. When I did I was fairly impressed, it’s better than the C code I used to write in Lucy.
I like using C in small CLIs like this, Chop is another of the kind I wrote recently, because it’s still the most cross-platform language. A good compiler is available on every OS, many by default. There’s lots of training data so AI can write it well.
Spoolie is available on Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS. Binaries are available in releases, but I’ll likely add package managers as well, Homebrew for macOS, a FreeBSD pkg repository, and Arch AUR, in the future.
If please like the project, please contribute. Or at least give me a star.