Wick Editor - Status Update (sorta)

The Wick Forums
#1

Wick in its current state is, and has been, dormant, as I am sure everyone knows by now. But roughly a week ago, we three moderators (me, Jovanny, and Hamzah_Al_Ani) had a quick meeting talking about what we can do with Wick moving forward.

We haven’t started taking any action since then, all we did was bounce a couple of ideas off each other. No promises on anything, but we are hoping to get Wick Editor back on its feet at some point. (I’m being intentionally vague because even I don’t really know how this will go yet. We’re all just hoping basically.)

That’s all for now, thanks everyone for sticking around.

9 Likes
Wick Editor lack of updates
When is the update coming out?
#2

we can only cope™

1 Like
#3

im excited

#4

I obviously don’t know the plan, and I don’t know how much you can do with Wick it self, But maybe you could restructure the forums a bit to be more open for non wick content. That way developers and animators from other places could meet up in this amazing community, or return to show off there new work since they left

#5

Happy new year from the Wick moderation team! I’ve got a small new update. (You know it’s serious when I type with proper grammar…)

Anyway, I don’t want to make any giant promises, but we have been gradually working on a fork of Wick Editor. Don’t expect any rapid changes though, since the codebase is ridiculously big and it’s basically impossible for us to read through all the code and understand absolutely everything like the back of our hand.

We do not have a releasable version of this fork, but we have made changes. And by changes, I mean basically one change, which is that HTML tab titles are now the project name instead of just “Loading…”. We’re working on it, I swear, it just takes forever to understand new code.

We are still busy people, so you can probably guess that we’re not getting anything done during most of the year. But for the time being, if you want to list some suggestions for things to add to the fork, by all means go ahead.

Again, not trying to over-promise here, but hopefully this gets you excited about what may come in the future.

9 Likes
Who is in charge of Wick Editor?
#6

HI AWC,

how are you working through the code? Do you have a version with more / better / easyier comments? I would love to dive in, as I still see a need for Wick, but as you said: it is a lot of code.
Do you have a public repro allready?

regards,

Paui

#7

we do have a repository over here (https://github.com/Candlestickers/Candlestick). there’s no way to open this fork of wick on the web (yet), so you would have to download/clone it, get node.js, and follow the rest of the instructions to get it working.

by the way, we were kinda stuck on the node.js part for like, months, but @Hamzah_Alani found out that you need nvm version 14 to install the correct npm. (it’s such an old version of nvm that if you are on a mac, you need either an intel chip or rosetta 2 to install it. not sure about other operating systems though.)

i dont remember much about the details myself but hopefully Hamzah can pitch in if you need assistance.

as for easier-to-read comments, no i’m just diving straight in, CMD+F ing, and hoping for the best. for some reason, there’s a ton of duplicate engine code, so i basically trial-and-errored which one was correct. however once i found it, i tried to label them by changing the engine version string from a weird date to something with “candle” in it.

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4 Likes
#8

Thank you for your reply!

I’ll try to get it running… I’m using NodeJS already, so I might get there :slight_smile:

Have you found out why/what is blocking a more recent version of Node?

I’m using Wick in a production-app, so I’m motivated to keep this running. I’m mostly interested to opdate all the used libs to there more recent versions. (PaperJS, etc etc.)
On my wishlist are:

  • easy centering of elements
  • multiline-test
  • centered text
    to name a few :-)

But first I need to get it running locally at al. Thank you for the pointers, I will get back to you on the results!

Paul

#9

Yes. Since the repository hasn’t been updated for a while (~3 years), all of the used libraries are very outdated… to give you a list— you can run the command
npm outdated

image
image972×1134 303 KB

Most of these packages are so old you can’t set them up with the latest npm version, so to get the repository to work we needed to downgrade our npm to v14 (any later version won’t work).

There are packages in here that we can update without needing to worry, but some package updates might require us to make changes to the code.

Let me know if you need any help with that

1 Like
#10

Hi @Hamzah_Alani,

thank you once again. From your screenshot it is clear that Wick will require a lot fo tinkering in order to getll all the libs to there current versions.
But I also notice there are some very large once we do not strictly need to get running to update Wick. (Electron being the largest.)
Personally, I’m willing to drop electron, for instance, to get all the other libs upgraded. This might speed the process up considerably?..
Hmmmm… I need to think a bit more about this, because now it seems I want to rebuild Wick. Well, that might actually be true, but then with modern tools :slight_smile:

I’m posting this just to try to get a conversation going about a way forward, as to not to loose this fantastic tool!

regards,

Paul

2 Likes
#11

Hi @BaronAWC,

could I maybe get access to the fork? I assume you have it on Git? I’m a somewhat experienced JavasScript-dev, and I would love to help this project along…
As I was discussing with @Hamzah_Alani here:


I have some skin in this game, as I use Wick in my application.

regards,

Paul

1 Like
#12

I can’t speak on behalf of all three of us, but onboarding other community members is certainly possible, so I’ll get back when we make a decision.

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#13

@pwiegers you should be allowed to contribute! i’m not sure how github handles this but if i’m not mistaken, you can just make a pull request here. same goes for everyone else, but we will be limiting pull requests to an extent (for example, you should definitely know the basics of git version control).

2 Likes
#14

That’s true, and as you mentioned there are a lot of libraries that we may not even need, one of them being Electron. Electron is only used for the app version of Wick, and in our case that’s not really something we’re focusing on.

I think this goes without saying but I would advise to be careful while removing libraries, as removing some libraries might result in issues that might not be easy to identify. Feel free to work with us if you run by any issues, we’re trying to understand the code more ourselves and there’s much work in this for one person to handle.

Most of us are also still students so we appreciate any contribution

2 Likes
#15

Candlestick… sounds a lot like my discontinued product Candlewick, you’re getting sued.

Jokes aside, it’s great to see progress on the new fork! Looking forward to more updates!

1 Like
#16

cool! cant wait to see what will be added to this fork in the future!

1 Like