Shoes, a Tiny Toolkit

Welcome to the Shoes development wiki. The Shoes home page is actually at shoooes.net and these pages are for folks who want to get into developing the code behind Shoes.

Now then. Shoes is a very informal graphics and windowing toolkit. It’s for making regular old apps that run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It’s a blend of my favorite things from the Web, some Ruby style, and a sprinkling of cross-platform widgets. (More in the README.)

Here’s a trivial little button app (compare with these):

Shoes.app {
  button("Press Me") { alert("You pressed me") }
}

A few other samples can be found in samples.

Hey, Welcome to Shoes

To start off, download Shoes for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. That link will give you the latest stable installer. This wiki also offers some other RecentBuilds.

The next place to go is The Shoebox. Fan supported, this is a repository of different games and hacks written for Shoes. Check it out!

If you’re an advanced user who wants to try the latest stuff, see the BuildingShoes page to get the source code for Shoes and hack it up!

Shoes Knowledge

• A fundamental concept: StacksAndFlows.
• The Entirety of Shoes, a complete map.
• Tutorials from blogs around the world.

Also, try typing shoes --manual to open up the built-in docs.

Beyond Shoes

Another great place to find links are the shoes toolkit or shoes ruby tags on del.icio.us.

• Send a message to shoes AT code.whytheluckystiff.net
• Cc: why AT whytheluckystiff.net

The archives are available at gmane.

The Shoes IRC channel is #shoes on irc.freenode.net.

Tell Me More About Shoes!

Well, you see, Shoes is the soul of the new Hackety Hack! At first, I was using Mozilla to build HH, but it was just too unwieldy for me. Shoes uses Cairo and Pango to do its drawing and text layout. And it manipulates Windows, OSX and GTK directly from there.

As a result, a lot of Shoes news and experiments happens at Hackety Org.