paarthmadan/cube

A tui for cube timing, written in Rust.

Cube Timer

A tui-based Rubik's cube timer written in Rust.

Instructions (pre-release)

git clone https://github.com/paarthmadan/cube && cd cube
cargo install --path .
cube

1. Press Space to begin and end a solve
2. Press q to exit the process

Still heavily in development – proper build and release instructions will be added shortly.

Feature List

• Timer
• Basic TUI
• Scramble generator
• Statistics
• Solve graph
• Persisting data across sessions (data written to ~/.cube/data.json)

Not yet implemented

• Minimizing CPU usage
• Toggling between different cube sessions
• Custom configuration (colours etc.)
• Optimizing UI for different frame sizes (right now it's ideally used in a small tmux pane off to the side :/)

How does it work?

• Built on top of the tui-rs crate.
• The process itself is really a glorified timer:
  • There are a few threads:
    • Keyboard Input
    • Redraw Interrupt Dispatcher
• Communication between threads uses basic message passing – Rust has a nice paradigm for this called mpsc.
• The main thread performs blocked-waiting for interrupts (events) spawned by other threads. Starvation isn't an issue because the redraw interrupt is dispatched at a fixed interval.
• The tick rate for the process is currently set to 50, which would mean the process exhibits roughly 20FPS, which is sufficient.

Motivation

• Practicing Rust
• Applying some of the fundamentals learned from Operating Systems
• Now I don't have to open my browser everytime I feel like cubing

cube's Issues

Persisting data across sessions

Essential feature to make this usable. Persist data across sessions, I'm thinking it'd be something along the lines of:

On exit:

1. Serialize session data into JSON or some similar file type (https://github.com/serde-rs/json, https://github.com/serde-rs)
2. Persist serialized data on disk

On entry:

1. Read from disk (if exists), deserialize, and populate process data
2. Write to local process data

Schema:

Ex:

{
    "times": [
      1.23,
      2.34,
    ],
}

We can write the file to ~/.cube/data.json