There has been a lot of hand-wringing lately about how GNOME is supposedly forcing everybody to use systemd, and is not caring about portability.

That is of course not true at all.

Theory

Portability has been a recurring topic in the discussions of the GNOME release team (of which I am a member). We don’t make it a secret that modern Linux is the primary target that we are developing on and for. And we are aiming to use technologies that are best suited for the task at hand – which has led us to use more of the services implemented by systemd (some of which are direct descendants of earlier mechanisms shipped with gnome-settings-daemon).

But we are happy for everybody who wants to try GNOME on other platforms, and we have a strong interest in making GNOME work well there.

Reasonable patches to help with this are always welcome. The shape of those patches can vary from case to case: it could be reduced functionality, alternative backends, or a shim that puts systemd-like interfaces in place.

Practice

To show that these are not just empty words, here is a screenshot of GNOME running on FreeBSD:

The screenshot was provided by Ryan Lortie, who has done a lot of work on making jhbuild work on FreeBSD.

And here is a video showing GNOME running on OpenBSD, courtesy of Antoine Jacoutot:

Pointers

Go here  to read more about the release team position on portability.

If you are interested in helping out with making and keeping GNOME running on more platforms, this page is another good place to go. It lists platforms that are well supported by GLib.

I spent some time recently on modernizing the look of  the application chooser in GTK+. Here is how it will look in 3.12:

As you can see, I added a search button, as it was showing up in the mockup I was working from.  Of course, I had to come up with some answer for how to make it do the expected thing. The application chooser has always supported typeahead search: if the focus is on the list, just type to search. This is an old feature of GtkTreeView:

But we’ve recently added a nice new search bar widget to GTK+, and I wanted to see if I can’t combine the old treeview search with the new search bar:

Thankfully, it turns out that this is very easy. You just  call

gtk_tree_view_set_search_entry (treeview,
                                search_entry)

and all the right things are happening automatically behind the scenes. The full commit that does this in the app chooser looks a bit more complicated, but that is mainly because the app chooser is broken up into separate dialog and widget classes.

If you have a treeview that could benefit from a more explicit search option, you should consider doing something like this.

Here is a video that shows this in action:

The GNOME 3.12 cycle was a little lighter in terms of screenshot-friendly feature work, with lots of effort going ‘under the covers’: Wayland porting, developer documentation improvements, application installation infrastructure, etc. But I still managed to find a few things worth showing while smoketesting the 3.11.5 release this morning.

System status refinements

The system status area was all new in 3.10, so naturally, there was some follow-up to incorporate feedback that we’ve received on the new implementation. One point that was raised by many people is that they rely on the system status area to know about wired network connections. So, we’re bringing it back:

Airplane mode improvements

Another thing we’re correcting is the subpar integration of airplane mode in the wifi submenu. In 3.10, the ‘Select network’ dialog was unaware of airplane mode. Now, it offers to turn wifi on when needed:

Desktop file actions

In another corner, applications can now provide ‘static actions’ in their desktop files. This is useful for actions that are meaningful when the application is not running, mainly alternative ways to launch the application.

These actions are now included in the right-click menu of applications in the overview:

It looks like this in the desktop file:

[Desktop Action NewDocument]
Name=New Document
Exec=libreoffice --writer
X-TryExec=oowriter

Thats all! GNOME 3.11.5 will be out later today, so you can try these things out for yourself.

In this post, I want to highlight some of the small things GTK+ does for your application that you may have never noticed, or haven’t thought about. GTK+ has many of these, and toolkit developers loose sleep over them, so you don’t have to.

Keyboard navigation

It is important that the entire UI of your application can be reached with the keyboard − a mouse may not be around, or the user may not be able to use it. To this end, GTK+ lets you move the focus between widgets using the Tab key. The order in which widgets are reached is referred to as focus chain. In most situations, GTK+ comes up with a reasonable order by itself. But you can always force a different order with gtk_container_set_focus_chain().

Apart from tabbing, GTK+ also provides directional navigation using the arrow keys, mnemonics to directly move the focus to specific widgets, and accelerators for actions in menus. Mnemonics are keyboard shortcuts that use Alt in combination with an underlined character; accelerators often involve the Ctrl key.

Internationalization

Most applications are translated in many languages. But you may have never seen how your application looks in one of its translations. You should check it out. In languages with a right-to-left writing direction, it is not enough to replace all strings by their translations; it is also expected that the interface adapts to the change in direction.

We casually call this flipping, and most GTK+ container widgets do it automatically when appropriate.

In the rare case where flipping is not appropriate (say, if you are dealing with maps, and you want to show an arrow that indicates West), you can override the locale-derived direction by calling gtk_widget_set_text_direction().

Baseline alignment

The human eye is very sensitive to jumps of the baseline as it moved over a line of text. If that happens, it leaves a ransom note feeling. The most common case where this can be a noticeable problem in UIs is when controls are layed out in a grid with labels.

GTK+ has the ability to align widgets with respect to their baseline. To take advantage of this, you must set the valign property of the widgets to GTK_ALIGN_BASELINE.

Accessibility

In modern UIs, many controls use just an icon. This looks nice and saves space, but it might be a problem if you can’t actually see the contents of the screen very well. A screen reader can only help if it knows how to translate those icons into meaningful text. For many standard icon names (such as the icons shown in this example), GTK+ does this automatically. If you are using other icons, you should use atk_object_set_name() to set a name on the accessible of the button.

GTK+ has seen a fair bit of new development over the last year. We’ve gained new containers such as list box and flow box and stack and new widgets like the search bar, places sidebar, header bar and action bar. The Wayland backend has come a long way, and we’ve gotten hi-dpi support and client-side decorations.

One feature that we haven’t gotten until today, and that has been on the wishlist for a while is popovers. 

Popovers are transient views that are somewhat in the middle between menus and dialogs. The are transient like menus – you don’t expect to keep them open for more than a single action. On the other hand, they can display arbitrary information and allow input and interaction like a dialog. One big advantage of popovers over menus is that they are much easier to interact with using touch.

These are of course very popular in mobile UIs, but it makes a lot of sense to have them available on the desktop as well.

Inside GTK+, we’ve had some nascent support for this style of UI with the touch selection work that Carlos Garnacho merged almost exactly a year ago.

Carlos has now generalized this work and turned it into a full-blown GtkPopover implementation. Since the work has only been merged today, I can’t really link to API documentation yet. But the API is very easy: you create a popover with gtk_popover_new(). It is a container like any other, so can just pack your content as usual. And you control its visibility with gtk_widget_show(). The direction of the ‘tail’ that points to the parent widget can be set with gtk_popover_set_position().

popover = gtk_popover_new (parent_widget);
gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (popover), my_content);
gtk_widget_show (popover);

We don’t yet have any users of popovers inside GTK+ apart from touch selections, but I expect that to change soon.

Many thanks to Carlos for getting this done!

Time to talk again about client-side decorations (csd).

A while ago, I’ve talked about themes and what adjustments they need to make csd windows look respectable. Back then, I avoided the most thorny issue with csd: window controls. Window controls are the close, minimize, and maximize buttons that window managers have traditionally put into their titlebars.

Early in the GNOME3 era, we tried to save some vertical space by simply hiding titlebars when the they containing important information. This is particularly relevant for maximized windows on small screens, where vertical space is scarce. This was the hide-titlebar-when-maximized property. As we soon found out, the lack of a reliable close button in the upper right corner with this approach is a big problem for many users.

More recently, we’ve switched to a different approach: Reclaim the area that has traditionally been taken up by the titlebar for applications. To this end, we’ve introduced the GtkHeaderBar widget, which lets applications use this space for its own purposes. This was pretty successful. Many GNOME applications are making good use of this now, e.g. nautilus:

These custom titlebars require window managers to have support for mwm hints, so we can convince them to not show their own titlebar. These hints have traditionally been well-supported in window managers — so far, the only problematic case we’ve found is xfwm4.

As you can see in that nautilus screenshot, there is a window control — a close button in the upper right corner, which will stay in there as the window is maximized, addressing the problem with hidden titlebars. Since the header bar is application area, the close button is only shown if the application author explicitly allows this by setting the show-close-button property.

This is a nice and clean story, but of course, things never stay that simple.

Window decorations, and in particular window controls are a traditional area for distro differentiation and theming (you may still remember the discussion about Unity buttons), and unsurprisingly, we soon got requests to allow some themability.

In 3.10, GTK+ added a style property, gtk-decoration-button-layout, to let themes control the button layout. At first, we only respected this property for  client-side titlebars that were not explicitly added by the application. This turned out to be insufficient and opened us up to some (justified) criticism about the (lack of) consistency with client-side decorations.

So, shortly before christmas, I’ve gone back and redone the configuration mechanism one more time, changing it to a combination of a setting, GtkSettings::gtk-decoration-layout, and a regular property, GtkHeaderBar::decoration-layout, whose default value is taken from the setting. The settting is backed by an xsetting, Gtk/DecorationLayout.

This adds more flexibility: Themes can influence the default value of the setting (via their settings.ini file), distributors can set a default value and users can override it via the xsetting (hopefully soon from gnome-tweak-tool).

But application developers / designers have the last word: they can hardcode the property to just show a close button on the left, if the application design does not accommodate wild variations in the header bar layout. Or they can read the setting and make adjustments, e.g. for the case of split header bars, as can be seen in the new gedit design:

If you want to experiment with this, GTK+ ships a two interactive testcases, testtitlebar and testsplitheaders:

This is a difficult area for a toolkit. We find ourselves between multiple competing interests:

• Users expect consistency across applications
• Distributors expect applications to adapt to whatever environment they are running in
• Application designers want applications to appear as designed, and not wildly different depending on the environment

I hope that the mechanism that is in place now is flexible enough to allow balancing these interests, and to make GTK+ applications work well in different environments.

One last thing I should mention in this context is the GNOME application menu. GtkApplicationWindow has had a built-in fallback for other environments since day one, but it is not that great.

It uses a mostly-empty menubar, which adds to the vertical space problems, and it duplicates the application name. In GTK+ 3.12, the fallback menu will be integrated in the header bar, and look much more natural:

Enjoy.

I recently heard that gnome-terminal in rawhide will reflow its content when resized. I tried it out, and its true:

This has been a very longstanding feature request for gnome-terminal. It has finally been implemented by Egmont Koblinger.  Thanks!

We are planning to to land a few more improvements to gnome-terminal this cycle. Next in line is may be a gnome-shell search provider.

An increasing number of GNOME applications take advantage of new possibilities with GTK+ header bars and client-side decorations.

Today I was asked if it is intentional that applications like nautilus cannot be moved or resized by border drag anymore when using themes such as Ambiance. Of course not! But client-side decorations move the responsibility for theming the titlebar and window borders from the window manager theme (which basically ceases to exist) to the toolkit theme. So, some adjustments are needed to make GTK+ themes take advantage of this.To figure out how this works in practice, I took a look at the Radiance theme. Here is how current nautilus looks with it:Very pointy, and neither shadows nor invisible borders – resizing the window is only possible via the window menu.

As a first step towards improving the situation, I added the following snipplet to the Radiance css:

.window-frame {
    border-color: darker(@bg_color);
    border-radius: 7px 7px 0 0;
    border-width: 1px;
    border-style: solid;
    box-shadow: 0 2px 8px 3px alpha(black, 0.5);
    margin: 10px;
}
.window-frame:backdrop {
     box-shadow: 0 2px 5px 1px alpha(black, 0.5);
}
.window-frame.tiled {
    border-radius: 0;
    background-color: @bg_color;
}

A few explanations are in order here: window-frame is the style class that GTK+ uses when deciding how to render the frame part of a client-side decorated window. The box-shadow gives our window a visible shadow, and the margin determines  the ‘invisible border’ around the window where it can be dragged. We set a less promient style for unfocused windows (in GTK+ parlance, that is called backdrop). Finally, we set a style without invisible borders and shadow for half-tiled windows. You may wonder why we don’t do the same for maximized windows: GTK+ enforces no borders for maximized windows, so the theme doesn’t have to do anything.

As a small refinement, I’ve added a some more css to make the title bar a little rounder:

.titlebar {
    border-radius: 7px 7px 0px 0px;
}

.tiled .titlebar {
    border-radius: 0;
}

.maximized .titlebar {
    border-radius: 0;
}

There is of course a lot more refinement that can be done here, like adjusting the padding around the titlebar buttons, and fixing the broken Home button. If you are interested in this, you should check out the relevant CSD section of the Adwaita theme.

It has been a while since I’ve last reported progress on the ongoing port of GNOME to Wayland. Giovanni did an unbelievable amount of groundwork in mutter and gnome-shell during the 3.10 cycle. After that all landed, we took a bit of a break to catch our breath, while GNOME 3.10 matured to 3.10.1 and now 3.10.2.

Now it is time to pick up the effort again, and sort out what remains to be done for full Wayland support in GNOME 3.12. From a high-level perspective:

• Wayland sessions in gdm
• Keyboard handling (layout switching, on-screen keyboard, accessibility, input methods, shortcuts,…)
• Pointer handling (pointer barriers, accessibility, better touchpad support,…)
• Window management (lots of details)
• Application support (gstreamer, clutter-gtk,…)
• Application testing and porting

If this sounds like a lot of work, that is because it is a lot of work.

Thankfully, quite a few of these things are already in progress or at least being planned. For example, a new xdg_shell interface has been discussed for a while to handle window management. For keyboard handling, Rui has started by implementing layout switching for weston. A new library for sharing input handling code is beginning to take shape too. clutter-gtk support needs subsurfaces, for which Jonas has patches here.

But there is still a lot to do, and any help is welcome. If you feel adventurous and want to learn about Wayland, please join us – there are tasks in all levels of difficulty here, you don’t need to be a über-X-hacker to find something useful to do.

More details on the Wayland port, including the list of open tasks, can be found on the wiki.