January 2020 – Happenings in GNOME

GtkSourceView Snippets

I’m trying to blog about every week now this year, so here we go again.

The past week I’ve been pushing hard on finishing up the snippets work for the GTK 4 port. It’s always quite a bit more work to push something upstream because you have to be so much more complete while being generic at the same time.

I think at this point though I can move on to other features and projects as the branch seems to be in good shape. I’ve fixed a number of bugs in the GTK 4 port along the way and made tests, documentation, robustness fixes, style-scheme integration, a completion provider, file-format and parser, and support for layering snippet files the same way style-schemes and language-specs work.

As part of the GTK 4 work I’ve spent a great deal time modernizing the code-base. Now that we can depend on the same things that GTK 4 will depend on, we can use some more modern compiler features. Additionally, GObject has matured so much since most of the library was written and we can use that to our advantage.

GtkSourceView branching

Branching

We’re currently finishing up the cycle towards GNOME 3.36, which means it’s almost time to start branching and thinking about what we want to land early in the 3.37 development cycle. My goal is to branch gtksourceview-4-6 which will be our long-term stable branch for gtksourceview-4.x (similar to how the gnome-3-24 branch is our long-term stable for the gtksourceview-3.x series. After that, master will move to GTK 4 as we start to close in on GTK 4 development. The miss-alignment in version numbers is an unfortunate reality, but a reality I inherited so we’ll keep on keepin’ on.

That means if you are not setting a branch in your flatpak manifests, you will want to start doing that when we branch (probably in the next couple of weeks) or your builds will start to fail. Presumably, this only will affect your Nightly builds, because who targets upstream master in production builds, not you surely!

Snippets

I’ve started moving some features from Builder into GtkSourceView. However, I’m limiting those to the GTK 4 port because I don’t particularly want to add new ABI right before putting a branch into long-term stability mode. The first to be uplifted into GtkSourceView is Builder’s snippet engine. It also went through quite a bit of rewrite and simplification as part of this process to make it more robust. Furthermore, having moved undo/redo into GtkTextBuffer directly has done wonders from a correctness standpoint. The snippet engine used to easily be confused by the undo/redo engine.

The most difficult part of the snippet engine is dealing with GtkTextMark that are adjacent. In particular if you have each snippet focus-position wrapped in marks. Adjacent, empty mark ranges can end up overlapping each other and you have to be particularly diligent to prevent that. But the code in the branch has a pretty good handle on that, much better than what I had done in the past inside of Builder.

The bits I still need to do to finish up the snippet engine:

Land the GTK 4 port on master.
Add various style tags to bundled style schemes.
Documentation of course.
A new snippet manager, file format, and parser. We’ll probably switch to XML for this so it matches language-spec and style-scheme instead of our adhoc format from Builder.

Future work

Completion

After the GTK 4 port and snippet engine has landed, I’ll probably turn my work towards updating the completion APIs to take advantage of various GLib/GIO advancements from recent years (similar to what we did in Builder). We can also do a bit of style refreshing there based on what Builder did too.

Indenters

If we can find a nice API for it, I’d like to land a basic indenter API as well. The one we have in Builder has worked, but it’s not exactly simple to write new indenters. Then we can start having contributions upstream which can be tied to a specific language-spec. Doing language specific stuff is always nice.

Movements Engine

How you move through a GtkTextView is rather simplistic. There are a number of keyboard accelerators for common movements but they are far more restrictive than what you’d expect from a code editor. In Builder we’ve had custom signals to do more robust movements which the VIM, Emacs, and Sublime emulation builds off.

We can make this more robust in the future using GTK 4’s widget actions. I plan to move a lot of the custom movements from Builder into GtkSourceView so that we can eventually have keyboard shortcut emulation upstream.

Event Controllers

One of the trickiest (and dirtiest) bits of code in Builder is our VIM keybindings emulation for the editor. It always was meant to be a hack to get us to GTK 4, and it did that fine. But we should let it end with that as the constraints from a gtkrc-based (GTK 2.x) system ported to CSS (GTK 3.x) is simply too much pain to bare.

In GTK 4 we have event controllers, especially those for handling keyboard input. I think it is possible for us to move much of a VIM emulation layer (for input) into an event controller (or GtkGesture even). Given that this would use C code instead of CSS, I’d have a much easier time dealing with all the hundreds of corner cases where VIM is internally inconsistent, but expected behavior.

Hover Providers

The Language Server Protocol has had success at abstracting a number of things, including the concept of “Hover Providers”. These are essentially interactive tooltips. Builder has support for them built upon transient GtkPopover. This seems like a possible candidate to move up to GtkSourceView too.

Other Possibilities

Some other possibilities, given enough interest, could be our OmniGutterRenderer from Builder (with integrated debug breakpoint and diagnostic integration), line-change gutter renderers (which can be connected to Git, SVN, etc), reformatting, semantic highlighting, and multiple cursors. However that last one is incredibly difficult to do from a completeness standpoint as it might need some level of plumbing down in GtkTextView for robustness sake.

GtkSourceView on GTK 4

I spent some time this cycle porting GtkSourceView to GTK 4. It was a good opportunity to help me catch up on how GTK 4’s internals have changed into something modern. It gave me a chance to fix a few pot-holes along the way too.

One of the pot-holes was one I left in GtkTextView years ago. When I plumbed the pixelcache into GTK 3’s TextView I had only cached the primary text content. It seemed fine at the time because the gutters (used for line numbers) is just not that many pixels. So if we have to re-generate that every frame, so be it.

However, in a HiDPI world and 4k monitors on our laps things start to get… warm. So while changing the drawing model in GtkTextView we decided to make the GtkTextView gutters real widgets. Doing so means that GtkSourceGutterRenderer will be real GtkWidget‘s going forward and can do all sorts of neat stuff widgets can do.

But to address the speed of rendering we needed a better way to avoid walking the text btree linearly so many times while rendering the gutter. I’ve added a new class GtkSourceGutterLines to allow collecting information about the text buffer in one-pass. The renderers can then use that information when creating render nodes to avoid further tree scans.

I have some other plans for what I’d like to see before a 5.0 of GtkSourceView. I’ve already written a more memory-compact undo/redo engine for GTK’s GtkTextView, GtkEntry, GtkText, and friends which allowed me to delete that code from the GtkSourceView port. Better yet, you get undo/redo in all the places you would, well, expect it.

In particular I would like to see the async+GListModel based API for completion from Builder land upstream. Builder also has a robust snippet engine which could be reusable from GtkSourceView as that is a fairly useful thing across editors. Perhaps we could extract Builder’s indenter APIs and movements engine too. These are used by Builder’s Vim emulation quite heavily, for example.

If you like following development of stuff I’m doing you can always get that fix here on Twitter given my blogging infrequency.

Introducing Bonsai

TL;DR: Pair your Linux devices, developer APIs to share files, create object graphs with partial sync between devices, transactions, secondary indexes, rebasing, and more built upon GVariant and LMDB. Tooling to build cloudless multi-device services.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about what types of products I’d like to see in GNOME and what is missing to make that happen.

One observation is that I want access to my files and application data on all my computing devices but I don’t want to store that data on other peoples computers. I have computers, they have internet access, I shouldn’t have to use a multi-tenancy cloud if I’m running as much Free Software as I do. But if that is going to be competitive it needs to be easier than the alternatives.

But to build this I need a few fundamental layers to build applications atop. I’ll need access to files using all the GIO file APIs we love (GFile, GFileEnumerator, GIOStream, etc). I’ll also need the ability to read and write application data in a way that can be shared between devices which may not always be connected to my home Wi-Fi. In particular, we need to give developers great tools to make applications that natively support device synchronization.

What I’ve built to experiment with this all is Bonsai. It is very much an experiment at this phase but it is getting interesting enough to collaborate with others who would like to join me.

Bonsai consists of a daemon that you run on your “mostly connected” computer. Although that could easily be a raspberry pi quality computer in your home. That computer hosts the “upstream” storage space for files and application content.

Other devices like laptops, phones, or IoT can be paired with that primary device. They communicate using TLS connections using pinned self-signed certificates with point-to-point D-Bus serialization on top. The D-Bus serialization makes it convenient to use gdbus-codegen to generate proxies and services.

One service available to devices is the storage service. It can be consumed from libbonsai-storage to allow applications to browse, create, move, modify and stream file content.

Applications are much better when they can communicate between devices. So a Data-Access-Object library, aptly named libbonsai-dao, provides serializable object storage built upon GVariant and LMDB. It supports primary and secondary indexes, queries, cursors, transactions, and incremental sync between devices. It has the ability to rebase local changes atop changes pulled from the primary Bonsai device.

That last bit is neat because it means if an application is running on two devices which create new content they don’t clobber each others history.
The primary issue here is dealing with merge conflicts but libbonsai-dao provides some design for data objects to do the right thing.

Bonsai could also could serve as a base to build interesting services like backup, VPN, media sharing and casting, news, notes, calendars, contacts, and more. But honestly, it can only do that if people are actually interested in something like this. If so, let me know and see if you can lend your time or ideas for what you’d want this to become.