ShareXtended

A Rusty program that provides ShareX utility commands.

Usage

Usage: sharextended.exe [COMMAND]

Commands:
  purge-online  Delete all screenshots that have been uploaded to Imgur
  help          Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help information
  -V, --version  Print version information

If [COMMAND] is not specified the program will run in interactive mode.

Motivation

I started this project a while ago after an online friend asked me how he could delete all his images hosted on Imgur. While a simple script was enough to help him, I wanted to make the project as accessible as possible by making it a standalone executable. I made that project with TS/Node.js and was planning to package it. I tried to use projects like PKG, but I kept having issues trying to package it. It wasn't able to package the Open dependency and would have to be downloaded alongside the package.

Why Rust?

Recently I just wanted to try out the most loved language for myself and was looking for a project to get started with. This project seemed like the perfect fit since it also allows for easy distribution with cross-platform compilation. So I decided to try Rust, and it worked like a charm.

Yes, I know this project could have also been done in many other (easier) ways, like:

• C#, powerful and also matching the language of the ShareX project.
• Or even simpler as a Powershell or Python script probably

But this project wasn't for any business related task and I wanted to try out Rust. So I did.

It's a bit hard to get started with due to these new concepts, like ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes, but I really like it. It's a very powerful language with great error messages and many useful crates. I'm looking forward to learn more about it.

Code

Watching video's from No Boilerplate motivated me to try out Rust. On advise about your Rust toolkit, he suggested the following Clippy lints:

cargo clippy --fix -- -W clippy::pedantic -W clippy::nursery -W clippy::unwrap_used -W clippy::expect_used

For now I omit the clippy::unwrap_used. It's not great to use unwrap as often as I do, but I use it for getting things working. I'm sure I'll get better at making use of Option and Result in the future.

I tried to store the static strings in the Cargo.toml, but I figured it's not meant to live outside the code. Also tried to resolve %USERPROFILE% in the code but solved it with the directories crate.

I used https://transform.tools/json-to-rust-serde as a reference for the JSON structure.

Crates used

• eyre: For simple error reporting
• tokyo & futures: For writing async Rust
• serde & serde_json: For (JSON) Serialization/Deserialization
• clap: For CLI parsing
• reqwest: For HTTP requests
• ansi_term: For colored output
• chrono: For time parsing and formatting
• indicatif: For progress bars
• dialoguer: For interactive prompts
• tinyfiledialogs: For file dialogs
• open: For opening files in the default application
• lazy_static: For static variables that require evaluation at runtime
• console: For console input/output
• directories: For getting the user's home directory