Month: May 2017

Razzle Dazzle

I spend a lot of time making flashy widgets for Gtk. Mostly because I find it entertaining. You can now benefit from the culmination of many years of my trial and error in a new library I’ve created, libdazzle. The code is currently on github but I suspect I’ll move it to git.gnome.org relatively soon.

Why another library? Because I wanted to. But also, because managing all of this custom widgetry in Builder is starting to get out of hand and I’d really like others to be able to use the code too. Every time I go work on another hobby project I get annoyed that I have to copy and paste a bunch of code over.

This library is truly the culmination of many years of my time writing flashy Gtk+ widgets and the surrounding plumbing. You’ll find everything from an animation framework, menu merging, tree helpers, missing data structures, caching, signal and property management, a panel engine, layered gsettings, theme management, state machines, keyboard shortcuts (including chords) and more.

It comes in at nearly 50,000 lines of C. You can imagine why I’m tired of the copy pasta.

The project builds with Meson, so it should be easy to use as a sub-project if you don’t want to rely on a system installed version. It has support for GObject Introspection and can also generate a .vapi for Vala if that’s your thing.

There is no documentation yet, but I’m slowly getting more and more tests added which can serve as examples in the mean time. Go read some code, it’s good for you.

Here are a couple teasers

3.26 Developments

My approach to development can often differ from my peers. I prefer to spend the early phase of a cycle doing lots of prototypes of various features we plan to implement. That allows me to have the confidence necessary to know early in the cycle what I can finish and where to ask for help.

We have some big stuff coming this cycle.

Panel Engine Revamp

Allan has been working on some major design work in how our panels and documents work. This has been needed for some time and things are looking good. To keep up with this, I’ve been doing some major improvements to panel-gtk, our panel engine. I managed to shake out a few bugs in the process and those fixes have made their way into the gnome-builder-3-24 branch.

The test program is not much to look at, but we have some necessary plumbing in place to do new things.

Shortcut Engine and Key Themes

Furthermore, I’ve been building a new shortcut engine to do the more advanced features we need. Gtk Shortcut Engine (GSE) provides plumbing for applications that need complex features such as multi-key “chords”, keyboard themes, and custom overrides by users. Many of you have asked for this in Builder, and I’m confident in saying it is coming for 3.26. You can find the work in progress in the shortcut-engine repository.

Ultimately I had to import a copy of the upstream’d GtkShortcutsWindow (based on what we wrote for Builder in 3.20) so that we could support chords. So the code-base looks bigger than it really is. The primary design (besides the keyboard themes) is the concept of a GseShortcutController and GseShortcutContext. These two things allow us to do some fun stuff like emacs-style “minor modes” as well as Vim-style modal keybindings.

I expect this to allow us to cleanup our Vim emulation quite a bit. It also solves some of our outstanding problems with keyboard shortcuts and unpredictable GAction activation. It’s really quite fundamental to how you’ll be interacting with Builder from a keyboard going forward.

Debugger

The big feature for 3.26 is the debugger. I have enough of a working prototype in place to have a reasonably good idea of what the moving parts are. As soon as we land the new shortcut engine and some of the panel updates I’ll be back finishing up that feature.

That’s it for now!