I will be writing a series of blog posts about various algorithms. The purpose of these posts will be to help me further my understanding and ability to explain algorithms. Each post will cover an algorithm, provide an implementation in a programming language, explain the algorithm using the implementation, and finally discuss any possible other discoveries I find when researching the algorithm.
This is the first of hopefully several tutorials on developing desklets for the Cinnamon desktop environment. In this tutorial, I will cover the basics of creating a desklet and do my best to link or refer to additional resources where you might find more information on the topics. Cinnamon is a linux desktop environment forked from Gnome Shell by Linux Mint. A desklet is a small application which appears on the Cinnamon desktop, Cinnamon ships with three desklets and more can be found here. Desklets are written in JavaScript and uses CJS which is based on Gjs. Gjs are JavaScript bindings for GNOME and is based on Mozilla's JavaScript engine Spidermonkey.
My reason for creating this tutorial came about when I was creating a desklet for Cinnamon. There were barely any guides or tutorials on creating a desklet and finding documentation on the libraries available in CJS was difficult. The only advice I saw was to read other people's source code and learn from that, while it is a great way to learn, it does not provide enough information. So I would like to share what I have learned and where I found it.
Our first desklet will be a simple "Hello, World!" program, a simple program which displays the text "Hello, World!" on the desktop using GNOME Shell's Clutter-based toolkit called St (Shell Toolkit). The St library provides an easy way to create simple user interfaces.