The purpose of this project is to make the process of making GRUB themes much faster and easier for the average user. Normally the process would look like this:
- Create a VM with GRUB as the bootloader
- Start writing the theme
- Recompile GRUB config
- Reboot
- Realize something is off by a pixel / there's more work to do
- Repeat from step 2 untill:
- Theme is finished
- Theme is good enough and you're tired
- You burn out
Paired with the fact that the iteration cycle is quite slow, this process is going to drive you nuts after a while. Oh, and did you know that the documentation is quite lacking too? Like an entire option was missing and some details are ommited? Yeah this is very fun. /s
It is time to put an end to this suffering. I decided to make a tool for previewing the GRUB theme. While it is possible that the preview isn't going to be pixel perfect, I hope this tool can get you at least 90% there and you can use a VM or real hardware to polish whatever doesn't quite line up.
TL;DR: this is a GRUB theme preview tool.
- A CLI that generates a preview image given a GRUB theme directory and GRUB boot menu state (progress bar state, menu items, etc)
- An interactive editor / automatic reload (pref. using WASM so it can be hosted on GH pages and a local version too)
- A Github Action to generate previews that can be used to provide release screenshots, update READMEs, etc.