So I’ve been busy lately porting Xfce apps and components to Gtk+3 (you can see on the roadmap page for 4.14 that we’ve come some way already – only the really uncomfortable behemoths are missing 🙂 ) and since I’ve been working on apps which I haven’t touched before (and which haven’t really seen much or any development in a while).
I thought I’d do a quick overview of some of my recent activities so everyone knows Xfce is still alive.
clipman
I have ported clipman to Gtk+3 mostly as an exercise, to get back to coding and to re-acquaint myself with the “fun” that is porting to Gtk+3 (including the obligatory #ifdefs for different Gtk+3 releases).
I didn’t really have the energy to add any new features there (apart from general Gtk+3 stuff like symbolic icons, which is nice for the panel plugin), but it had the intended effect for me plus Eric and Florian helped out, which made it more fun. In the end we even got Steve to sit down and crank out a very nice fix for an extremely widespread issue in Xfce.
notifyd
Basically Ali did all the hard work of porting notifyd to Gtk+3. I was left with the hard work of polishing the edges and making it release-ready (which ended up being much more work than I anticipated and now that I’m mostly familiar with the codebase I’ve also started to add – for now: small – features). So yeah, 0.3.0 is out! Hooray! 🙂
I also managed to write down some basic docs for notifyd (they’ll be linked to in the 0.3.1 release) which also explains the theming aspect a little bit.
For now I’ve planned some features – we’ll see when and if I get to them, but amongst others:
- “Do not disturb” mode (still have to figure out where and how to display the “missed” stuff or whether to bother with that at all)
- More themes by default (currently we only have good ‘ol Smoke and evergreen ZOMG PONIES!)
- More bugfixing
- Better docs
settings
This is actually Sean’s project and he already ported most of the dialogs (only display missing at the time of writing) and this is really exciting as it is one of the core components. Can’t wait to install this beast on a productive machine to see what will happen 🙂
libxfce4ui
I didn’t do much here apart from handling the release and fixing the theming of XfceTitledDialog for Gtk3.20 (and below) in accordance with the Gtk+ Devs (still unreleased, will come with libxfce4ui-4.13.1). Generally speaking now that Glade support is fixed and we have working dialogs I guess there’s not much more to do in that lib (I may be wrong though).
terminal
This is Igor’s playground now, I merely helped with porting the settings dialog and getting rid of some rough edges there. I’m using the Gtk+3 port of the terminal on a daily basis though and am very happy with it – nice work Igor! 🙂
notifyd “do not disturb” is something I’ve long wanted =D at least if I can get a summary of “this happened while you were away” after I unlock my screen …
will the new terminal support >256 colors?
Since new xfce4-terminal is based on vte3 – yes, it does support 24 bit color.
Please see https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728 (the page contains tests for colors verification).
Great, thank you for the update and keep up the good work! 🙂
A feature I always felt was missing from most osd daemons was a log of all notifications. Even if you see them they might disappear before you could finish to read them. I thought about implementing them myself and I would put that log in a tab of the settings. Maybe this way a user could “replay” a notification and see how a theme might look with it.
And it would work really well with a DnD mode, just a thought 😉
Sure, it’s not unlikely I’ll add a notification log, although maybe not in the first step (which would just be a plain silent mode).
Thank you for this. I’m super excited for the new features in the terminal. Will XFCE be switching from XFWM to the GTK3 style decorations?
It’s possible that single applications will do this but for the moment it’s not planned for the core components.
After all 4.14 is about doing (mostly) a 1:1 port without changing the UI dramatically. We’ll play more with that in later releases when we’re working on features again.
I hope XFWM4 now adds at least some animations. Having a visual cue of what is happening when I click or change desktops etc. is really helpful. It is more ergonomic than aesthetic
That’s not really on the roadmap for 4.14 and I’m not sure it’s in the cards at all.
If you want animations and the like there are several other window managers you can use with the rest of Xfce without problems.
Glad to see progress! Everyone’s like “huh, through xfce was dead?” No. 4.12 just released on recent lts’s, 4.14 sounding interesting.
I love my xfce. It’s slick, fast, easy to master. First choice even on my modern PCs. Keep up the great work.