From Ancient Greek κλῆσις (klêsis), related to καλέω (kaléō, “I call”).

After around 3 months of effort, I have finally released the first version of Klisi.

Klisi is the result of a desire to fill a small gap in the available application offering for the GNOME desktop environment and a recent interest in the Clojure programming language.

I wanted to develop a callgrind profile viewer that better integrates with GNOME and can be used as a simplified alternative to KCacheGrind.

Have you heard enough already? Install and try out the application. You can come back for the rest of the write-up and leave a comment with your thoughts.

It all started around one year ago.

After more than 7 years of using i3 as my window manager — through the end of my university years and the start of my professional career — I decided that it was time to embrace Wayland. The obvious choice would be to continue using another tiling window manager. sway would be the prime candidate. But I was also eyeing a more complete solution. Tiling window managers are great, but they require a lot more manual configuration to have a fully functioning system. I am grateful for what I learned in the process, but I was ready to off-load some of that work to someone else.

So, I switched to GNOME. I had always liked the aesthetics of its applications, so having them integrate natively with the whole environment appealed to me. I had also noticed that I could translate my i3 workflow directly to GNOME without any significant changes. I was already using most windows maximized and delegating to tmux for my terminal tiling needs. Scriptability is a little trickier in GNOME than in i3, but GNOME would handle most of my needs now anyway.

This was last November.

Some time after that — in April — I saw on Hacker News the announcement for the Clojure documentary. People seemed excited about it, so I decided to watch it. Going in, I had zero knowledge about Clojure. I did not know anything about Rich Hickey. I did not know anything about the philosophy of the language. I had only read about it in various post titles, but had never gotten down to study it and use it.

The documentary was engaging enough and it piqued my interest. I wanted to try to learn another functional programming language after previous Haskell adventures and this seemed like a nice opportunity. Clojure being a Lisp dialect made the whole premise even more appealing.

I started by reading all beginner-friendly documentation on the official website and then went over Clojure for the Brave and True trying to be as hands-on as possible.

I was ready for the next step. They say one of the best ways to learn and understand a programming language is to use it in a project. And this is exactly what I did. I set out to combine Clojure and GNOME application development.

On the 2nd of May, I made the first commit of Klisi. At the time, I had not yet settled on a name and I was only able to launch an empty GTK window. Today, the application can do a little more. After a long development list, consisting of required features and other ideas that came to my mind while developing, I believe it is good enough to serve other people.

This brings us to today and the first release.

It was time to share my application with the world. I hope that someone will find it useful and decide to make it a part of their development workflow.

In any case, I am very satisfied by the result so far. I have learned a lot and I will continue to do so, while I further explore Clojure, GTK and Flatpak development. There is a long way to go and I believe all the lessons I will learn in the process will be valuable one way or another.

This is it from me for now. Try out Klisi and let me know what you think. I will appreciate any well-meaning feedback.