General FAQ about Liblarch

General FAQ about Liblarch

Why libLarch?

In Getting Things GNOME! we tackled constraints of TreeWidget. It was designed to manage trees. Tree is a graph structure where every node except the root node has just one parent and it is a root of several subtrees.

Getting Things GNOME! supports tasks which have more parents – directed acyclic graph. In the end we want to display tasks in a form of tree which is more natural for humans.

libLarch manages directed acyclic graphs internally and represents them in other form, e.g. trees.

Filtering tasks is one of biggestadvantages of Getting Things GNOME! Filters show only nodes which satisfy a condition like “has tag @to_buy”. Combining several filters you get tasks you want, e.g. every work-related task which I completed the last week.

We again tackled constrants of TreeWidget: if a parent is hidden, children can’t be shown. TreeWidget does not allow you to specify which nodes you want to show by a simple function.

libLarch encapsulates these details and let you spend the saved time on other aspects of your application.

Why is it called libLarch?

Well, at first, liblarch was created to handle the particular trees used by GTG. And what’s a huge tree you can recognize from quite a long distance? The larch, obviously. Hence libLarch.