TutCatalog5
https://gitlab.com/iborco-software/tutcatalog/tutcatalog5
A full Python/Qt6 rewrite (2024–2025) that went deep on a typed field toolkit — a TOML-driven type system with editor/viewer widget pairs for every field kind. It is the cautionary tale the implementation plan reacts to explicitly: it "built layers deeply … without reaching a usable end-to-end whole," which is exactly why rehuco opens each milestone with a tracer bullet instead. Its field-toolkit code is still a valuable design reference for slice LocalEdit2.
File formats
.tc— per-collection sidecar, now readable as both YAML and TOML (the test corpus carriescollection_yaml.tcandcollection_toml.tcside by side). The TOML form also modernizes field names (authors,extra_tags,images_count = {declared, actual, is_complete},urls).typestill selects the resource kind — Tutorial / ReferenceImages / Collections (the README frames a "collection" as tutorial, images, etc.).- Config — TOML-leaning app settings.
- Uses pyside-ibo as a submodule — specifically the first snapshot (the one
since renamed
pyside-ibo-obsolete), which supplied the image browser, Markdown editor/viewer, the generic widget set,QSettingshelpers and the logging stack. Note it predates that library'sApplicationSingleton, which only exists in the later snapshot Resource Hub uses.
What it did
Rendered and edited .tc through a general, config-declared field/type system rather than a
hard-coded viewer — the most ambitious editor of the lineage. But it stalled before becoming a
usable end-to-end catalog, its energy spent on the toolkit rather than a working spine.
Compared with rehuco
| Capability | TutCatalog5 | rehuco |
|---|---|---|
| Typed field toolkit (editor/viewer pairs) | Yes (TOML-driven) | LocalEdit2 — tc5 is the design reference |
.tc view / edit |
Yes | LocalEdit1 / LocalEdit2 |
| YAML and TOML sidecars | Yes | rehuco standardizes on JSON .rehu; reads legacy .tc (YAML) via adapter (LocalEdit3) |
| Reached usable end-to-end | No (the cautionary case) | Tracer-bullet-first methodology exists to avoid exactly this |
| SQLite cache / browser | Not really | .rehudb (CacheDB3) / browsers (CacheDB4) |
| Scraping, web, borrow, multi-node | No | deferred (acquisition tooling) / WatchTutorial, Borrowing, Swarm |
ApplicationSingleton etc. |
via pyside-ibo | reimplemented in borco-core/borco-pyside |
Can rehuco work for its .tc?
Yes. The YAML .tc maps through the standard field-schema .tc→.rehu
adapter (LocalEdit3). The TOML variant is tc5-specific and rehuco does not read TOML sidecars, but its
richer field names (authors, extra_tags, structured images_count) actually pre-echo rehuco's
own target shape — where they differ, rehuco's schema is the more considered version (e.g. the
structured images_count becomes a scanned integer). Nothing blocks import; tc5's lasting value is
the toolkit design, not its data.