Month: August 2015

Many of you have asked for help with keyboard shortcuts in Builder. It was always something we wanted to do, but I was humbly waiting for upstream to get that into the toolkit so we would get it for “free”.

Since that didn’t happen this cycle, I rushed Allan to put together an updated design and I set out to implement it for 3.18. You’ll notice type-ahead search and a nice visual style.

The original “hack” of an implementation used XMACROs. For those of you that write C and don’t know what that is, look it up. I’ll wait. Now that you can see the shock and horror, you’ll be happy to know I didn’t go that route in the long term. The code isn’t ready to be generally usable, but it’s in better shape now that I added a custom GtkBuilder parser. Example here.

There is still much to do, but this will help you get started!

Early on in the Builder development road-map, I discussed how I didn’t want to use a GtkTreeView for a sidebar (or much of a sidebar at all). But everything changes when you need to ship software.

I’ve been working on some ideas for a replacement file browser based on some immature designs. But at the moment, they are very much just that. Ideas.

For those who have jhbuild installs, I’d love for you to try Builder’s “wip/path-bar” branch. It’s not an accurately named branch, but oh well. In particular, try the “tests/test-stack-list” program and see how you like it from a usability standpoint. Everything has trade-offs, and I’d like to inform myself before pushing further on the design.

cd tests
make test-stack-list
./test-stack-list

You can watch a video of what it looks like if you don’t have a Builder checkout. Sorry for the youtube link, I don’t want to host the bandwidth. Alternatively, the following works.

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYox__Wwatg
totem “hacks on a plane-GYox__Wwatg.mp4”