Category: GNOME

Hylke wrote about installing fonts in GNOME and how there isn’t an easy way to do this at the moment. Since his suggestion was so simple, I got out my editor and spent this evening hacking. It’s feature freeze tomorrow, so I’ve pushed the changes into master and any testing would be greatly appreciated!

There are probably a few tweaks to be made to padding, etc. Hopefully I can also work out how to get the word wrapping/scrolling they way it needs to be without resorting to fixed sizing (it’s not as simple as you might think).

Just a quick note to say another social is being organised in London for this Friday. Open to any GNOME hackers/contributors/hangers on. Sign up and details on the wiki page: http://live.gnome.org/LondonBeer/Version2.4

My gobject generator project I mentioned a while ago has been named “Turbine” (thanks to Charles for the suggestion). I’ve made a few more improvements and it’s now available in a GNOME git repository:

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/turbine/

git clone git://git.gnome.org/turbine

There has been recent talk about GObject Generators, so I’m going to throw my own one into the mix. It’s based on Ross’ gobject.py, but given a fresh dose of GTK+ and auto completion love.

If you’d like to try it out, there is a git repository available:

git clone http://gnome.org/~thos/git/gobject-gen.git

I’d like to move it to GNOME git, but before I do it needs a decent project name. Does anyone have any suggestions? Something descriptive but unique, preferably with only 2 syllables.

Kudos to the Anjuta GObject generator for the auto completion idea. Also, before any one suggests it, I know about Vala but we’re not using it for this project, so it’s of no use.

Does anyone know what’s happened to vim’s “comment” feature in Debian Lenny? It seems this feature is enabled (i.e. –version shows +comment) and the default string set, but it just doesn’t work. Does any one have any ideas?

Update: many thanks to Lubomir; the answer was that the ‘r’ and ‘o’ options where missing from formatoptions.

I recently had cause to remind someone about the evilness of using backticks as quote marks, which lead me to dig up this really useful document: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

Please show this to anyone to who abuses backticks in this way and enlighten them!

We will be bringing up these ideas for discussion on gtk-devel-list.

This week I am in Dublin for the GTK+ theming hackfest. On Monday we spent a long time throwing ideas around and discussing various approaches. Thankfully since then, we got on with some proper hacking. I’ve been working on two things:

cairo based engine api

Ben and I have been working on completely converting the default GTK+ theme to cairo so that it will be easier to move to a completely cairo based api for theme engines in the future. This would allow third parties to draw widgets without the need for a GdkDrawable, or even X11 itself.

Css styling in GTK+

Rob and I also discussed CSS themeing and how we might implement this within GTK+. We decided it would be good to implement a way of styling generic GObject types as not all objects on screen and GtkWidgets (e.g. GtkCellRenderer). We decided to make a GStylesheet object which acts as a data store (implemented as a GObject wrapper around libcroco, which we’ve also been enhancing) and a GStylable interface (which would replace the style properties in GTK+). Apart from allowing us to style any GObject with CSS, this also allows third parties to retrieve style properties without creating their own fake GTK+ widget.

I’ve just created myself an account on github, and am pushing my work from this week there: http://github.com/thos

Just updated art.gnome.org with the art-hub branch. This is a move in a slightly new direction for art.gnome.org, trying to focus on helping artists wanting to get involved in artwork for GNOME and free software. The user submitted themes and artwork are still there and at some point I hope to go through and pick out some of the best ones to create a new gallery of top quality artwork for GNOME. Many thanks to Andreas for the new front page design and all those in #gnome-art who helped out with testing and made suggestions.