#gnome #gnomeshellextensions #typescript Discuss...

GNOME Shell extensions can get disabled any time for various reasons, so it's essential to properly clean up the entire extension state when an extension gets disabled. GNOME Shell doesn't provide a lot of infrastructure for this purpose, tho, so let's roll our own pattern for properly destroying a GNOME Shell extension in Typescript.

#gnome #gnomeshellextensions #typescript Discuss...

The ecosystem for GNOME Shell has come a long way in the last few years. We now have a comprehensive guide for extension developers and good API docs for the underlying native libraries. The API documentation in GNOME Shell itself is still lacking, but meanwhile its Javascript source code is a surprisingly good and readable reference.

With GNOME 45 the shell took another big step: It finally uses ES modules now instead of the legacy import syntax of GJS. While this causes major breakage for all extensions, requiring every single extension to be ported to the ES modules, it finally enables mostly seamless integration with standard Javascript tooling which is increasingly build around ES modules these days.

Together with another recent tool this means we finally have Typescript for shell extensions!