Month: February 2011

Now that we’ve finally rolled 3.0 out of the door… it’s time to hang up our hats and stop adding features to GTK+.

Err, nah forget about that – instead lets add cool stuff for an awesome 3.2 now !

As discussed in bug 636695, using GdkRGBA colors in GtkTextView is just about the last thing blocking us from completely deprecating GdkColor and moving GTK+ to an RGBA only api for colors.

But wait ! Implementing the RGBA color values on GtkTextTag is not a mere api cleanup, it also lets us…

Do stuff with GtkTextView that was not possible before

As you can see, now the foreground, background and paragraph background colors of text in the text view can be painted with translucency to the background of the GtkTextView, this particular demo connects to the “GtkWidget::draw” signal and simply fills in the background with checkers.

Of course most of the time you use a text view with a default solid white background for readable text, however this new feature does open up some…

New Possibilities

As usual, this installment of “GTK+ feature of the week” was brought to you by Openismus GmbH.

Currently the code is available for your compiling pleasure in the rgba-texttags branch.

What follows here is just my own personal brain storm…

Ideas for GTK+ hackers

While going over the GtkTextView code, which we all know is a fearsome animal not to be taken lightly or hunted in plain sight I came up with a bit of an idea of how we could start taming this beast. Text View code is not horrible really, it just hasn’t received much love over the years and needs a little tidying up.

Currently we have these components:

• GtkTextBuffer and friends (GtkTextIter, GtkTextMark, GtkTextChildAnchor, GtkTextTag, GtkTextTagTable): This is all a part of the TextView’s data model, it’s very modular and it all makes sense. Sure, it’s much code but all of that code is well segmented and justified as far as I can see.
• GtkTextBTree, GtkTextLine, GtkTextLineSegment: Some caching on the view side of things, all of this is private and caches things about how to render segments of text from the buffer model into the view, still quite modular code and probably very well thought out and well written.
• GtkTextLayout: The heart of the beast where all the cached data is traversed and prepared for rendering, this is probably where most hackers are scared off… while most if not all of the code in there is well justified and needed, this code could probably be better organized and have more rich comments to guide the hacker who’s looking at this code for the first time.

Now the fun part:

• GtkTextAttributes/GtkTextAppearance: This is something of a customized PangoAttribute the text appearance is a structure holding all the needed attributes for rendering a ‘segment of text’, a segment being a continuous string of glyphs that all share the same attributes… actually the GtkTextAttributes structure holds a GtkTextAppearance member, they could probably be merged into the same structure and the apis which handle this could be better defined (currently we have GtkTextTag modifying the attributes manually with exposed struct members and the like).
• GtkTextRenderer (found in gtktextdisplay.c): This is the really fun part, this jem is actually a derived PangoRenderer class and takes over the actual rendering of the glyphs (the fact this jem already existed is why it was relatively easy enough to add RGBA rendering of the pango glyphs into the mix)… The GtkTextRenderer object inspects the custom GtkTextAttributes and uses these extended PangoAttributes to render the glyphs.

Now without digging into the ultra-complex innards of GtkTextLayout, I thought it would be a sweet idea to give GtkTextRenderer and GtkTextAttributes a bit more air time… these are for the most part internals of GTK+ and would not become part of the public api but… we could use the GtkTextRenderer to render text in GtkLabel and GtkEntry (and possibly elsewhere).

By working a little bit towards fine tuning the GtkTextRenderer and attributes to have a sane internal API and reusing it, we would already be able to render text from GtkLabel and GtkEntry using RGBA text attributes… at a relatively low cost. Also, a move in this direction would help demystify the text view code somewhat (at least hackers would be more familiar with GtkTextAttributes and GtkTextRenderer and would not have to consider those entities while looking at the rest of the huge code that is GtkTextView).

Anyway, just some food for thought for anyone who might be interested.

It’s been a few weeks and Glade has learned a few new tricks worthy of showing off.

Today’s release of Glade 3.9.2 was brought to you in a large part by our hero Juan Pablo Ugarte the Magnificent (and the crowd goes wild !)

Project widgets go off screen

Having the project widgets go off screen allows us to draw over the whole project widget hierarchy as a single canvas, resulting in added sexiness for Glade:

It also allowed us to simplify the code base to some extent where it comes to handling events on widgets, not to mention event handling on project widgets is more solid and fail safe now (GtkComboBox can finally be selected in the workspace; something that has been escaping us for years now).

Glade workspace gets a new look

Something I’ve wanted for a long time but never took the time to implement is to have a more coherent workspace and view of the project, recently I went and added notebook tabs to navigate through open projects and now our hero added the final touch by allowing the user to scroll through all the project widgets in the Glade workspace:

With this new touch to Glade’s UI, selecting widgets in the inspector treeview on the right cause the workspace to automatically scroll to the selected widget and ensure it’s visibility. In the future one of our plans is to add some drag’n’drop support to the workspace so that project widgets can be easily moved from one toplevel to another (however the new interface already makes it easier and more obvious for the user to cut/copy widgets and paste them in other toplevels).

GtkComboBoxText

In other, practical news, Glade receives some support for new widgets and objects, one of them being the GtkComboBoxText widget and sports a custom editor to make it easy for the user to create a simple dropdown list using GtkComboBoxText:

This little treeview here lets you easily type in the text for each item, delete items intuitively with the Delete key and reorder the items using the built-in Drag’n’Drop functionality of the treeview. Just type into the < Type Here > row to add new items. Click on the icon on the right to edit the i18n attributes (translator comments and context etc.).

GtkFileFilter and GtkRecentFilter

These filtering auxiliary objects have finally become more useful in Glade as well, now it’s possible to add a list of filename patterns or mime types for the filters (these objects can be set for GtkFileChooser and GtkRecentChooser widgets respectively).

For these editors I was able to just reuse the editor I wrote for editing GtkComboBoxText by simply disabling the translation features, I borrowed the < Type Here > editing paradigm from the signal editor since I thought it was a great way to offer lots of functionality while saving on screen real estate (no need for clumsy “Add” buttons in the UI)… it also makes for good consistency in Glade’s UI.

Glade is now a GtkApplication

This was just a weekend code spike which was surprisingly easy to implement. Using GtkApplication automatically makes Glade a single instance application practically for free. It also opens the door to opening files properly from whichever uris are supported by GIO. Currently Glade still only opens files that are on a local harddisk, but the only thing stopping us from opening remote files handed to us via the GFile is a hand full of logistics in the core (handling read-only mode, displaying a proper project name even if there is no local path to save it to; that kind of internal business logic).

So, Glade 3.9.2 is now available for download at http://download.gnome.org/sources/glade/3.9/, I only just published this tarball so the disks should still be warm: i.e. get them while they’re hot !