User Interface

Content Areas

The content area is divided into three main regions:

1. Repositories: the bazel workspaces on your workstation.
2. Streams: a view of build event protocol invocations.
3. Community: a list of well-known bazel repositories waiting to be explored.

Menus

The menu system is context sensitive, meaning the menus change according to the component tree being visited.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are listed in the menus. They are generally 2-key sequences such as r, a (rule attributes).

Single letter keys such as b (build), t (test) are reserved for common operations. Application home is mapped to the backtick ‘`’

The search bar is focused via the forward slash key /.

Search

Search is populated incrementally via the things (mostly targets) that have been visited thus far in your browsing session.

Unfortunately this does not represent a comprehensive list of targets in the universe of the build. The reasoning is that populating a target index is an expensive operation and is undesirable to lock the bazel server for this purpose.

A future improvement may address incrementally updating a target database.

Shortcomings

The UI is a single page application but still may require page reload at times. Bzl may trigger bazel queries that take a long time to complete and can be difficult to cancel.

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