CurlFlow

[Gerowen]

When it comes to programming I'm just a novice/hobbyist tinkerer, but the other day I noticed that uGet hadn't been updated in something like 5 or 6 years, so I got to wondering how much work would be involved in making my own graphical download manager.  Another reason was when I started looking at alternatives, there didn't seem to be a whole lot.  I tried one called "Gabut" that was just overly noisy and overwhelming to look at.  Every time you clicked a button or opened the program there was this stupid animation that took a solid second or two to play.  Also, for the first time ever, I wanted to try out "vibe coding" with an LLM just to see how much work would be involved for somebody with a passing understanding of what they want, like me, to get something usable.  So mostly thru the use of the Jan desktop app with a 30B Qwen model, and the Brave Leo thing (also using Qwen) I got the LLMs to produce something functional, and have spent the past few days here and there reading thru it, fixing and improving things.  The end result is a Python program that runs on Linux and gives you a very simple GUI download manager.  You can add multiple new downloads, set a custom directory on a per download basis, pause/resume them mid run, cancel/remove them and use basic HTTP auth for password protected downloads.

I've put it on Gitlab if anybody is interested.  One word of caution though.  Even though I've added some variables to account for somebody getting this to run on Windows, it doesn't currently.  It uses the "gi" module to draw GTK graphical windows (Linux) and at least currently I can't get PyGObject, which is what I think provides gi on Windows, to install via pip; it keeps giving me an error.  So if you'd like to tinker with it on a Windows machine, if you can somehow get "gi" available it should work just fine for you, but for all intents and purposes I'm just targeting Linux since that's what everything in my house runs on.

You can read the source and download release files, including a .deb (Debian/Ubuntu) package to install it on those systems, at:

Repo: https://gitlab.com/gerowen/curlflow

Releases: https://gitlab.com/gerowen/curlflow/-/releases