Month: May 2016

This Week in GTK+ – 3

In this last week, GTK+ has seen 26 commits, with 5081 lines added and 3618 lines removed.

Planning and Status
Notable changes
  • The documentation has seen various improvements, notably in the CSS reference and the GTK+ 2.x → 3.x migration guide.
  • Matthias Clasen added a section to the API reference that maps the release notes in the README file; this section will be used as the starting point for the migration guide from 3.x to future major releases of GTK+.
  • The gtk-builder-tool utility, which allows to validate, simplify, preview, or inspect a UI description file now leaves the GtkDialog:border-width property alone when simplifying the properties set to a default value.
Bugs fixed
  • Bug 759037 – GtkInfoBar: documentation not updated wrt background colors and message types
  • Bug 747206 – gtktextview: note on how to get line spacing between two paragraphs
  • Bug 766643 – Frozen windows when unmapped with pending configure event
  • Bug 766122 – Re-used filechooser displays $pwd half of the time when shown
  • Bug 766878 – placesview: Do not mark icon name as translatable
  • Bug 764203 – Default background color for the ‘textview border’ node
Get Involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

This Week in GTK+ – 2

In this last week, GTK+ has seen 90 commits, with 8502 lines added and 7914 lines removed.

Planning and Status
  • Matthias Clasen updated the GTK+ road map entry for a “tab strip” GtkStack controller widget with his prototype branch.
Notable changes
  • Matthias Clasen and Lapo Calamandrei commited some CSS changes to GtkScale that were required in order to cover all possible cases of marks on all sides. Additionally, the value node GtkScale uses when it displays a value was missing from the documentation, and has now been added.
  • Debarshi Ray fixed some allocation issues with GTK_POLICY_NEVER in GtkScrolledWindow discovered while working on libvte.
  • Matthias Clasen added two new cursor names, context-menu and no-drop, to the list of CSS cursor names supported by GTK; the cursors are provided by Adwaita.
  • Matthew Waters fixed GDK to use the thread-safe Wayland dispatch API; this is especially useful in case multiple threads are polling the Wayland file descriptor.
  • Olivier Fourdan worked on allowing the Wayland backend to try and return sensible values when asking GDK on which monitor a window is displayed; this is still a work in progress, and may require protocol extensions to avoid guesswork that can lead to false positives.
  • Ondrej Holy worked on GIO, GVFS, and GTK+ to ensure that cold-plugged drives would be appropriately detected as removable in the side bar for the file selection dialog.
  • Javier Jardón finally updated GTK+ to use upstream gettext, instead of the macro and build files modified by GLib.
Bugs fixed
  • Bug 373745 – Do not use AM_GLIB_DEFINE_LOCALEDIR(GTK_LOCALEDIR) and use gettext instead
  • Bug 766405 – Stack shows incorrect frame in widget factory on wayland
  • Bug 763852 – gdk/wayland: event source is not multi-thread aware
  • Bug 766314 – Spurious leave-notify event after touch up
  • Bug 766442 – Broken drag & drop between windows
  • Bug 766440 – Scale slider button has stopped discerning & rendering appropriately for scales with vs without marks
  • Bug 766566 – Wayland: gdk_screen_get_monitor_at_window() unreliable under Wayland
  • Bug 766336 – Crash when selecting rows with rubberbanding
  • Bug 765924 – Improve external drives detection
  • Bug 766642 – Switches in HeaderBars Are Badly Integrated
  • Bug 766737 – stack: Only map children when necessary
  • Bug 766323 – GTKPopover gives warnings if visible when reparented
  • Bug 766782 – OpenGL in broadway leads to segmentation fault
Get Involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

Cursors in GTK+

History

Cursors have traditionally been a big mess in Linux.

The X11 cursor font has been passed down to us from times immemorial, and given us gems such as gumby () or trek (). Unfortunately for us, this state of affairs was frozen into the GDK api with the GdkCursorType enumeration and the gdk_cursor_new() function.

Later on, the Xcursor library came around. It invented its own image format for storing cursors and brought us cursor themes, but didn’t do anything to answer the question “What cursors should my cursor theme provide ?”

Since there is no official list of recommended cursor names, cursor themes frequently provide all the variants of cursor names that have been spotted in the wild. As an example, here is the list of cursors included in the oxygen cursor theme. If you are wondering, the hex strings in this list are a clever trick of Xcursor to retrofit themed cursors underneath core X11 applications that use cursors from the cursor font mentioned above.

CSS to the rescue

About a year ago, we decided to finally improve the GTK+ cursor story. Thankfully, the CSS3 spec contains a decent list of cursor names that can be reasonably expected to be available across platforms.

Standard cursorsSince the GdkCursorType enumeration contains too much nonsense and is not easily extensible, we decided to make gdk_cursor_new_from_name() the recommended API for obtaining cursors. The documentation for this function now lists the CSS cursor names (follow the link above to see it), and the cursor handling code in the various GDK backends tries hard to give you meaningful cursors for all of these names.

On some platforms (such as X11 with a random cursor theme), we may have to fall back to the default arrow cursor if a certain cursor is not present in the theme. As part of this general overhaul of the cursor code, the Windows backend grew support for cursor themes.

GTK+ itself is now using gdk_cursor_new_from_name() exclusively, with the standard cursor names. And gtk3-demo includes a demo that shows all the standard cursors and lets you try them out. The screenshot above shows it.

The changes described here went into GTK+ 3.18, which was released about 9 months ago.

What you should do in your application

Most likely, you don’t have to do anything! GTK+ widgets use suitable cursors all by themselves, and you can benefit from that without any extra work.

If your application is creating its own cursors for whatever reason, you should check carefully if one of the standard cursors shown above is suitable for you. Using a standard cursor ensures that you will get a suitable cursor regardless of the platform your application is running on and regardless of the cursor theme the user has chosen.

Please use gdk_cursor_new_from_name() to generate your themed cursor, since this is now the preferred API for this task.

This Week in GTK+ – 1

What’s up with GTK+ for the week of 9 May 2016 – 15 May 2016

In this last week, GTK+ has seen 51 commits, with 5375 lines added and 4970 lines removed.

Planning and Status

The 3.22 development cycle is picking up pace while we go through the items of the Roadmap.

Notable changes
  • Olivier Fourdan fixed scroll event handling in GtkMenu, to ensure that it behaves consistently on X11 and Wayland with regards to smooth and discrete scrolling
  • The list of available protocols in the Connect to Server help popover is now populated using the list of supported schemes in GVFS, thanks to Georges Basile Stavracas Neto
  • Benjamin Otte has pushed a commit that lets GtkWidget emit the style-updated signal on unrealized widgets instead of delaying until realization; the original behavior was the result of an older optimization to avoid too many invalidations during construction, but the style system has improved over the years.
  • Timm Bäder pushed various clean up commits over various widgets, like GtkListBox, GtkStack, and GtkToolbar.
Bugs fixed
  • Bug 766166 – key bindings in gtk.css are ignored
  • Bug 766207 – Fix build on pre-C99 compilers
  • Bug 765939 – [Wayland] very slow scrolling in GtkMenu using the touchpad
  • Bug 756570 – gtkplacesview no longer provides guidance on address formats
  • Bug 766120 – Scale draw_value() align changed from centre/right (H/V) to left, causing significant visual regression
  • Bug 766233 – Crash when server does not support XI2
  • Bug 766175 – Translation of quotes may misinterpreted by GTK sidebar
  • Bug 765700 – GtkPaned use causes “How does the code know the size to allocate?”
  • Bug 682080 – Gtk:ERROR:gtktoolbar.c:2271:logical_to_physical: assertion failed: (logical == 0)
  • Bug 766458 – widget: fix GtkLabelAccessible NULL links.
Get Involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

This Week in GTK – 0

In order to improve the communication between the GTK team and the rest of the GNOME platform, as well as application developers, we’re going to start writing weekly status reports on what happens in GTK and the rest of the core GNOME platform.

These reports are heavily inspired by the ones that the Servo team writes.

You can expect a weekly post on this blog every Monday; we’ll look at notable changes; new contributors; new features or deprecations; and scheduled events.

If you have questions, as usual, direct them to the GTK development mailing list.

Have fun!

Hello, World! (Reprise)

Hi all, and welcome back to the GTK+ development blog.

We’ve neglected this blog for a while, after the 3.0 release, but we think it’s kind of important to have a place where to talk about GTK+ (and the rest of the core GNOME platform), how it’s changing, and where it’s going.

Going forward, we are not going to use this blog for announcements — though if you want the, you can simply subscribe to the gnome-announcement mailing list. Instead, we are going to use this space to present what is happening in GTK+; to discuss the road map; to spotlight some new feature, and maybe some old one that is not well known.

Stay tuned, and as usual: have fun!