Yorba recently received funding from Adam Dingle toward fixing a smorgasbord of bugs in the GNOME ecosphere — from gedit to Epiphany to Nautilus to GTK, and more.  The quantity of tickets (over fifty!) and the breadth of the applications they covered meant we needed to find someone with a particular affinity for the depths of GTK and GObject.  Fortunately, we found such a person in Garrett Regier, who’s been doing a smash-up job the past few weeks knocking down these particularly aggravating bugs.

To give a taste of some of the fine work Garrett’s been up to:

• can’t set download folder – What looked to be a bug in Epiphany’s Preferences dialog turned out to expose some issues in GtkFileChooserButton too.  That and File chooser seems over-enthusiastic about using subdirectories solve some usability issues with the GTK file chooser interfaces.
• “Location” column would be helpful for search results and Open the directory of a search result/recent file – Both first filed in 2006, Nautilus now lets you know where to find the files you searched for and can open those folders in a new window.
• A number of gedit plugin bugs and tweaks, including a slew of them in the File Browser (a plugin I basically live inside all day when I’m coding): display icons beside every file, Alt+Home should jump to home directory, allow me to type a folder path directly, and should display files in same order as Nautilus.

As you can see, most of these so far are annoyances, but long-standing annoyances that can make the user feel there’s something not quite right.  Some were down-right maddening.  Consider the over-enthusiastic file chooser bug.  As time went on, its reporter “trained” himself to work around it.

Garrett is still at work on Adam’s list and so more fixes should be dropping soon.  In addition, we’ve asked Garrett to start working on larger projects, including a Find in All Files gedit plugin that should be more stable and easier to use than the currently existing alternatives.  Stay tuned!