Elten3 on GitHub

Ever had one of those "I wish Elten would just..." moments? Sometimes that is the beginning of a useful contribution. The code is on GitHub and I'd love more of you to join in.

There is plenty to do, from persuading a stubborn keyboard shortcut to behave to improving audio, speeding things up or making Elten feel more at home on your operating system. Clearer documentation, translations and testing other people's fixes are welcome too. Community work has already brought us Linux support and many smaller improvements that make everyday use nicer.

Whether you have been programming for years, are learning your way around Ruby or have an AI assistant open beside you, there is room for you here. Experienced developers can make a particularly useful contribution where audio, accessibility, performance and native platform code get complicated. If you are finding your feet, a small annoyance you can reproduce is a lovely place to start.

Yes, that includes "vibe coding". The contribution guide explicitly welcomes AI-assisted work. Just stay involved: read the changes, understand what they do and try them yourself. You are responsible for what you submit. A model announcing that everything is fixed is encouraging; Elten actually working afterwards is rather more convincing.

For more advanced contributions, please spend a little time with the documentation in the repository before diving in. There is quite a lot there: getting Elten running from source, how the pieces fit together, where development is heading and how to contribute. For ordinary Ruby changes, you can run straight from your checkout without rebuilding the launcher or making an installer.

One thing you should keep in mind. Keep each pull request about one problem or a coherent improvement. If a tiny fix starts bringing half the codebase along for the ride, it is probably time to pause. Small fixes can go straight into a pull request; for a substantial change, talking it through first can save everyone a surprising amount of work if those were to be refused.

Please also keep translation work separate from functional changes; there is no need to regenerate the translation template as part of an ordinary fix.

Use this thread to ask where to start, talk through ideas and find people to work with. Bug reports and concrete proposals still belong in the Red Book so they can be tracked; GitHub Issues are disabled. If your pull request tackles a forum report, link it so everyone can follow along.

Pick something that interests you, ask when you get stuck and let us know what you are working on. It will be good to have more hands, more ideas and more people who know why that particular bit of code does that particular strange thing.

Thank you. :)

GitHub repository: https://github.com/dawidpieper/elten3

I have this idea that could make the experience better for those that don't fully rely on screen readers, but use magnification and high contrast text. I'm thinking of some sort of on screen text display, either in the white box the Elten window creates, or maybe some sort of native screen thing, I don't know what the best way would be, and I'd definitely need to take a decent amount of time to get it right if I was to do something like that.

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Yes that. I'm glad we've got some proper structure for this.