@SableRaf i've added you as an optional reviewer here. but if you happen to have time, you can try out the instructions and see if that makes your life easier. but note that i haven't added instructions for getting an example sketch just yet.

Thanks for tagging me @catilac

I’ll follow the instructions and share my experience while trying to adopt a beginner’s perspective, and with only minimal troubleshooting of my own.

I was able to successfully run

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

but at the end I got this warning which I did not understand:

WARN: The following commands are shadowed by other commands in your PATH: uv uvx

The next steps went smoothly except for the last one

uv run sketch.py

error: Failed to spawn: `sketch.py`
  Caused by: No such file or directory (os error 2)

Note: at this point, if I didn't know about ls I'd be stuck.

I noticed that the directory contains a hello.py, so I tried:

uv run hello.py

This printed:

Hello from mewnala-sketchbook!

Note: at this point, if I didn't know about nano I'd be stuck.

The content of hello.py doesn’t seem like a libprocessing/mewnala sketch, which looks a bit scary:

def main():
    print("Hello from mewnala-sketchbook!")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

At this point, I’m not sure what the expected next step is.

Suggestions:

• Add a short explanation of what each step does and the expected outcome so beginners can verify they’re on track.
• Replace hello.py with sketch.py with mewnala syntax in the default sketchbook.
• Add instructions on getting started with your first sketch.
• Assume not everyone is comfortable with the command line
• Get these instructions tested by real beginners (unguided/unmoderated to avoid bias)

By the way, I also tried to run the examples in libprocessing but running uv add mewnala throws:

error: Requirement name mewnala matches project name mewnala, but self-dependencies are not permitted without the --dev or --optional flags. If your project name (mewnala) is shadowing that of a third-party dependency, consider renaming the project.

And just running uv run shapes.py (for example) triggers a full mewnala build which takes a very long time.

By the way, I also tried to run the examples in libprocessing but running uv add mewnala throws:

error: Requirement name `mewnala` matches project name `mewnala`, but self-dependencies are not permitted without the `--dev` or `--optional` flags. If your project name (`mewnala`) is shadowing that of a third-party dependency, consider renaming the project.

And just running uv run shapes.py (for example) triggers a full mewnala build which takes a very long time.

thanks for all of the feedback @SableRaf this is super helpful. i think that it's clear it creates confusion to have mewnala instructions that have nothing to do with libprocessing in this repo.

there will be considerable iteration on this, but what i'll do is link to a wiki page for how to install mewnala so we can keep updating it faster and without a PR.

at some point it might make sense to make a separate mewnala repo. but that shouldn't happen until things are stable. moreover, i think an architecture diagram will be illustrative.