https://github.com/Kethku/Pando

What

Pando is a tool for designing and editing bespoke graph structures. It is designed to be general purpose enough to be used across a variety of domains such as shader graphs, todo task trees, grammar specifications, and more.

Why

Pando started as a project to easily edit and visualize todo trees for my personal projects. I originally built the tool just around graphviz and a special grammar for declaring the structure of the todos, but as time has gone on, I've realized that a more fluent ui is necessary to make something like that truly useful.

After porting the basics to react and eventually druid in rust, I realized that an editor for graphs like I've been envisioning is both a more complex UI problem, and more generally useful than I expected.

Many (most?) software domains have parts of the problem that are best expressed as graphs. I believe that further, not representing the more visual parts of a software problem in a visual form is a mistake and leads to a lot of wasted time and effort. Pando is my attempt to make this problem simpler in a way that anybody could pick up for whatever project.

I think a project like Pando could change the way we build software for the better. I imagine a world where Pando could be used in any project when a visual problem occurs. Rather than defining things like render graphs in code, we could define the bounds of what they can do in a visual way that highlights the graph structure and build the rest of the application as an interpreter over the resulting graph.

Further by building a single editor for all of these domains, we can invest in making the UI not just usable, but truly great. No longer will we have to settle for good enough for designers, vfx artists, or modelers. We can build something that is truly wonderful to use and spend time with.

How

Pando in its final version will be composed of a few interconnected parts:

• A graph file format built on Sqlite for storing the graph data and the specification for what is allowed in the graph and how to display/edit it.
• An editor which parses the graph specification and provides a UI for editing nodes that match it.
• A specification editor which lets users author the above specification using the same UI that end users can author themselves.
• A parser generator which will generate code in a variety of languages to parse the graph files into usable plain old data structures based on the specification.

Once these minimum features are implemented, there are some further features that will take things to the next level for some specific domains:

• Extract graphs to svg with configurable themeing for displaying elsewhere.
• Allow connecting to the editor from external plugin servers to provide custom functionality such as inline inspect values/partial image renders or other linting. A relatively simple api like this would be required to really compete with other shader graph editors.
• An interface for linking to other pando files either for the specification (think standard specs defined in a known url for example or from a database of useful known specs) or for other parts of graphs (think libraries of parts of graphs that are useful in many places in a project).
• A standard way to diff and merge graphs in source control. Sqlite is not easily merged in git automatically so we will have to smooth over this problem in some way. I expect that teachings from crdts could be adapted to make merges automatic and conflict free.

Dev Log

Pando is a part of my push to make tangible and documented progress on a project every day.

Day4 - Pando
Day5 - Pando Parser
Day6 - Pando Parser Completed
Day8 - Pando Abbreviations
Day9 - Pando Generator
Day10 - Pando Command Line Interface
Day22 - Pando VNext
Day53 - Pando in the Browser
Day54 - Remove Pando Abbreviations
Day55 - Pando UI