yad/AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md

Cursor Cloud specific instructions

What this project is

YAD (Yet Another Dialog) is a single C / GTK+3 command-line tool that renders GTK dialogs from shell scripts. It is not a client/server app: there are no databases, web servers, ports, or background daemons. "Running the app" means building the yad binary and launching a dialog against an X display.

Build system is GNU Autotools. Build scaffolding (configure, Makefile, build/, m4/) is git-ignored and must be regenerated with autoreconf after a fresh clone. Full build instructions live in README.md.

Build & run (dev)

Standard flow (see README.md):

autoreconf -ivf
./configure --enable-html --enable-spell --enable-sourceview --enable-icon-browser
make -j$(nproc)

The update script already runs autoreconf -ivf on startup, so normally you only need ./configure ... && make. Binaries are produced in-tree: src/yad, src/yad-tools, src/yad-icon-browser (no install required to test).

Running a dialog (non-obvious)

• A live X server is available on DISPLAY=:1 (confirm with xdpyinfo). GUI dialogs render there; the Desktop pane / computerUse see this same display.
• Dialogs block waiting for user input. When testing non-interactively, launch with nohup ... & and redirect stdout to a file, or use --timeout=N.
• yad --form ... > out.txt prints selected field values as a |-delimited line to stdout only when the user clicks the affirmative (OK/Save, exit 0) button. Cancel/close produce no output.
• Quirk: yad --version exits with a non-zero code (252) even on success.
• When driving dialogs via the Desktop, avoid Space/Enter on focused widgets — they can activate a default button and close the dialog prematurely; prefer direct mouse clicks.

Lint / tests

There is no automated test suite and no lint config in this repo (no make check / TESTS). Validation is done by building and manually running dialogs.