Open Forms is now 0.4.0 - and the GUI Builder is here

A quick recap for the newcomers

Ever been to a conference where you set up a booth or tried to collect quick feedback and experienced the joy of:

• Captive portal logout
• Timeouts
• Flaky Wi-Fi drivers on Linux devices
• Poor bandwidth or dead zones

This is exactly what happened while setting up a booth at GUADEC. The Wi-Fi on the Linux tablet worked, we logged into the captive portal, the chip failed, Wi-Fi gone. Restart. Repeat.

We eventually worked around it with a phone hotspot, but that locked the phone to the booth. A one-off inconvenience? Maybe. But at any conference, summit, or community event, at least one of these happens reliably.

So I looked for a native, offline form collection tool. Nothing existed without a web dependency. So I built one.

Open Forms is a native GNOME app that collects form inputs locally, stores responses in CSV, works completely offline, and never touches an external service. Your data stays on your device. Full stop.

What's new in 0.4.0 - the GUI Form Builder

The original version shipped with one acknowledged limitation: you had to write JSON configs by hand to define your forms.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Writing JSON to set up a form? That's totally normal and not at all a terrible first impression for non-technical users." And you'd be completely wrong, to me it was normal and then my sis had this to say "who even thought JSON for such a basic thing is a good idea, who'd even write one" which was true. I knew it and hence it was always on the roadmap to fix, which 0.4.0 finally fixes.

Open Forms now ships a full visual form builder.

Design a form entirely from the UI - add fields, set labels, reorder things, tweak options, and hit Save. That's it. The builder writes a standard JSON config to disk, same schema as always, so nothing downstream changes.

It also works as an editor. Open an existing config, click Edit, and the whole form loads up ready to tweak. Save goes back to the original file. No more JSON editing required.

Libadwaita is genuinely great

The builder needed to work well on both a regular desktop and a Linux phone without me maintaining two separate layouts or sprinkling breakpoints everywhere. Libadwaita just... handles that.

The result is that Open Forms feels native on GNOME and equally at home on a Linux phone, and I genuinely didn't have to think hard about either. That's the kind of toolkit win that's hard to overstate when you're building something solo over weekends.

The JSON schema is unchanged

If you already have configs, they work exactly as before. The builder is purely additive, it reads and writes the same format. If you like editing JSON directly, nothing stops you. I'm not going to judge, but my sister might.

Also thanks to Felipe and all others who gave great ideas about increasing maintainability. JSON might become a technical debt in future, and I appreciate the insights about the same. Let's see how it goes.

Install

Snap Store

snap install open-forms

Flatpak / Build from source

See the GitHub repository for build instructions. There is also a Flatpak release available .

What's next

• A11y improvements
• Maybe and just maybe an optional sync feature
• Hosting on Flathub - if you've been through that process and have advice, please reach out

Open Forms is still a small, focused project doing one thing. If you've ever dealt with Wi-Fi pain while collecting data at an event, give it a try. Bug reports, feature requests, and feedback are all very welcome.

And if you find it useful - a star on GitHub goes a long way for a solo project. 🙂

Open Forms on GitHub

Welcome to another update about everything that’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. As has become my custom, this post covers a two week period, this time from 18 May until today, 29 May. As usual the Foundation continues to be busy, with events, infra, governance, and accounting activities all happening simultaneously. Read on for more information!

Events

Linux App Summit (LAS) 2026 was held in Berlin over the 16-17 May weekend. I’ve heard quite a few reports now, and everyone seemed extremely positive about the event. Kristi wrote a nice summary if you want more details.

The GNOME Foundation had two team members on the ground helping with running the event, which we co-organize with KDE. I’d like to take this opportunity to give a big thank you to the event’s sponsors: openSUSE, Tuxedo, Nextcould and Codethink. This event wouldn’t be possible without your support.

In addition to LAS, work is continuing on arrangements for GUADEC 2026. The deadline for travel sponsorship applications has now passed, and the Travel Committee has met to decide who will be funded. Notifications will be going out soon.

Board Elections

The process is officially underway for this year’s Board elections . Terms on our Board of Directors are two years in length, and each year half the board seats are open for election. This year we have five seats being contested.

The 2026 election has a slightly different schedule to previous years. In the past, there was no gap between the candidacy period, in which people can announce their intention to run, and the voting period. This meant that there was little opportunity for last-minute candidates to participate in discussion prior to voting taking place.

To address this, we’ve added a one week discussion period to the schedule, which will run between 8 and 15 June, between the candidacy and voting periods. This will hopefully give us opportunity to have more structured and inclusive debate amongst the candidates. We are still figuring out what that might look like, so if people have ideas or want to help, let me know in the comments.

GNOME Fellowship

We are currently in the very final stages of confirming and announcing the successful candidates for the inaugural round of the Foundation’s Fellowship program . Expect an announcement very soon.

Got a Concern?

Last week we introduced a new policy for handling of concerns about the Foundation, which is now part of the project handbook.

The new policy covers how to report concerns about people who are working for the Foundation, either in a paid or voluntary capacity. It also covers more general concerns about the Foundation.

The main goals of the policy are to:

• have a documented reporting procedure for those who have concerns relating to the Foundation
• clarify how concerns will be responded to
• provide reassurance for those reporting concerns, including that concern reports are welcome, are taken seriously, and will never result in retaliation

We hope that this policy will make it clear how you can inform us of a concern if you have one. We also want to emphasise that we want to hear concerns, so we can address them. Please do use the new reporting procedure.

Finance/Accounting

Work has continued on the finance and accounting operation over the past two weeks. Highlights include:

• Our transition to a monthly rather than quarterly close reached a significant milestone this week, with the completion of our April finance reports within three weeks of the previous month end. This is probably the fastest ever turnaround for our finance operation, and is a huge win for us in being able to effectively manage our finances.
• Following input from the board, corrections have now been sent to the accountants for our audit and annual tax filing.
• Applications are still open for our Director of Finance and Operations part-time contract . Candidates have until 4 June to submit.
• Finally, as I mentioned in my last update, we are in the process of retiring a number of finance platforms as we consolidate and streamline our operation. This week saw another platform retired, which brings the total number of eliminated platforms to four.

Infrastructure

Our infrastructure experienced a DDoS attack last weekend , which Bart and Andrea have been dealing with. Thankfully it seems that services weren’t too badly affected, and we’ve already improved our protection against similar attacks in the future.

Also on the infra side, Bart wasn’t at LAS this year, but he did spend some time writing two great posts about Flathub’s internals: How does Flathub even work? and Why are Flathub downloads so slow sometimes? . They’re a fascinating read if you’re interested in Flathub.

That’s it from me! As always, thanks for reading, and see you in two weeks.

We want to share some updates and future plans from the GNOME Circle Committee with you. The Circle Committee is responsible for reviewing and accepting apps and other components into GNOME Circle as well as maintaining the review criteria .

The biggest issue for us, and for maintainers who submitted apps, has been the considerable backlog of unreviewed apps. There are cases where apps have been waiting for feedback for years. We are very sorry for those who have been affected by this. We are trying to finally address this issue now.

AI Policy

As a precaution, we have adopted the AI policy that already applies to GNOME Shell extensions. With the rise of low-quality machine-generated software, there is a risk that GNOME Circle could be overwhelmed by new submissions of this nature, further clogging the review queue.

This policy is a starting point, and for now, it will only be enforced on new submissions. We are open to receiving feedback on the AI policy from existing Circle maintainers. In a quick survey, 62% of Circle maintainers reported not using LLMs at all, 34% reported using them for small questions or snippets, and only 3% are taking larger parts of code from them. No maintainer selected the option for no longer writing code themselves.

Meanwhile, Flathub has also tightened their AI policy. Since GNOME Circle apps are usually expected to be published on Flathub, this policy indirectly applies as well.

Closing New Submissions

To make sure that we are focusing on submissions that haven’t been addressed for a long time, we will stop accepting new submissions for now. We will reopen submissions when we have made a considerable dent in our backlog.

New Handling of Issues

This is mostly a technical detail, but from now on, we will close issues that are awaiting feedback from the maintainer. When providing an answer, maintainers should just reopen the issue. This gives us a better overview of which issues are awaiting further processing by us.

Early Reminder About the Use of Outdated SDKs

Every GNOME release cycle, we spend a considerable amount of time on getting GNOME Circle apps to update their SDK on Flathub before the SDK becomes unmaintained. To avoid this in the future, we will try something new: We will remind maintainers much earlier that they are using an outdated SDK – months before it reaches EOL, rather than just a few weeks. This means apps using the GNOME 49 SDK will soon be part of an automatically generated reminder issue. To get the reminder, please make sure that you have provided a GNOME GitLab account in your project’s .doap file.

Growing Benefits

We are steadily growing the benefits for GNOME Circle apps and their maintainers. Among the benefits that were added are:

• Having a student work on your project for Google Summer of Code or Outreachy.
• Hosting your help pages on help.gnome.org .
• Getting a tag for your project on GNOME’s Discourse .

Of course, all contributors and maintainers of GNOME Circle projects are still eligible for GNOME Foundation membership. You can check our full list of benefits .

Call for Reviewers

We are in constant need of more reviewers in the Circle Committee. If you have already reached out to us, and we haven’t gotten back to you, please give it another shot. You can find us in #circle:gnome.org .

Here are the noteworthy news about the gedit and Enter TeX text editors. (Some sections are a bit technical).

A single package for gedit and its core plugins

Before, users needed to remember to install the gedit-plugins package in order to benefit from additional plugins such as Word Completion or Bookmarks .

Now, all core - or “official” - plugins are part of the main gedit module . So, Word Completion , Bookmarks and others have been copied into the gedit module, and gedit-plugins is now empty/archived.

Note that there are also third-party plugins which are available in other repositories.

New version on the Microsoft Store

gedit 50.0 is now also available on Windows .

The re-implementation of document loading continues

It's now a recurrent topic. Progress has been made, but more work is necessary to fully replace the GtkSourceFileLoader internals.

This time, here is a general description of the methodologies used along with the current state of affairs, without entering into too much technical details. If you're an experienced developer, it'll most probably ring a bell to you :-)

The typical “divide and conquer” methodology is followed: the problem is divided into several smaller ones. The sub-problems are solved individually, providing utility functions and small classes. Then things are built on top, with several layers, gradually solving bigger and bigger problems.

It all looks nice, except that an iterative process is also needed, to revise the solutions already built because of unforeseen problems (it happens all the time in computer science).

The current progress status is that some utilities need to be reworked in order to be a better fit for the above components, and also to fix a couple of unforeseen problems. Thankfully it's not a “back to the drawing board” situation, as the utilities that lie at the bottom layers don't need any change.

For the curious reader, here are the two unforeseen problems encountered:

• iconv() can output nul bytes even for UTF-8 as the target charset. Embedded nuls are not valid UTF-8 according to g_utf8_validate() . So an additional pass of validation is necessary, to escape invalid UTF-8 bytes.

• With the new implementation, at most two copies of the whole file content needs to be present in memory. I stumbled across a corner case where three copies would be necessary, so it needs to be fixed. The three copies were: (1) the content containing a single chunk (or at least a big chunk) of invalid bytes, (2) the invalid chunk escaped, and (3) the content as inserted into the GtkTextBuffer .

  It's just a matter of escaping the invalid bytes directly / at a different place.

  (Note that this is a concern only for the work-in-progress branch; current stable versions of gedit doesn't suffer from that issue).

Enter TeX goodness

The Projects feature has been re-implemented in a better way (mostly under-the-hood changes).

The module is again on GNOME Damned Lies, so there are many translation updates. Thank you, all translators around the globe! In the past I contributed to the French translation, and I directly saw that GNOME translation teams do very high quality work. So, thanks again :) !

Other stuff

As usual there are some other work items fixed or where progress has been made. Among others:

• The comment/uncomment actions have been fine-tuned.
• A prototype has been created in order to improve the main “sandwich” menu in gedit.

Code re-use and Business-to-Business opportunities

There is a lot of potential with the libgedit modules (or also with GtkSourceView for GTK 4), to grow the project into something like the GStreamer multimedia project (but at a smaller scale) where there is a lot of B2B activity with consultancy companies helping to create new products for other businesses.

Especially with libgedit-tepl, the name “Text editor product line” means that it's possible to create other text editors or IDEs products (more easily).

An example that I have in mind is Arduino and its specialized IDE. But there are new programming languages or development platforms that pop up regularly, so there are opportunities to collaborate with them and develop great developer tools for them.

I'll talk about it more in the future, but if you read this and are interested to develop such a business model for gedit and/or GtkSourceView, talk to me !

Ongoing Work

Back in March, I started to tackle this MR for GNOME Crosswords. It allowed me to learn a lot about navigating the codebase, adhere to naming conventions, and collaborating with others involved in Crosswords.

Crosswords Editor features a section for users to input metadata, such as author name, puzzle URL, and date. Originally, the MR was to convert and store the user’s manually typed date to ISO8601. This means storing the entered date in the form YYYY-MM-DD, while the user just needs to type in a date using the GDate struct .

Upon code review, the scope expanded to move from manual typing to selecting a date on a drop-down GTK calendar widget. I was able to implement this concept by following the architecture of an existing widget (edit-shapebg.c/h/blp) which placed shapes on the crossword puzzle. Then I connected the new calendar widget to the metadata so the chosen date from the now drop-down calendar will be stored in ISO8601 format yet display respective to the locale of the person using g_date_strftime.

Project Start

With the start of GSoC, I have spent a lot of time this week reading, white-boarding, and began setting up some structure to adding vocab-style crosswords to the libipuz library.

The basic constraints and workflow that I mapped are:

• A user can input up to 30 words (strings), with a 25 character capacity.
• Upon hitting enter or a button to generate, a Depth-First Search (DFS) algorithm starts to piece the words together on a blank grid. The algorithm can backtrack to tear apart words and rearrange them until a valid graph is formed
  • I’m going with DFS at the moment to prioritize the longest-to-shortest word seeding the graph in order to increase possibilities of connections
• Every time the user generates the graph, it will be treated like its own isolated creation, recalculating the layout from scratch to allow for cleaner undo/redo states and easier addition/deletion of words
• I don’t want words being placed right next to each other unless it was intentional for a 2+ word answer, which each word would be separated by thick lines
  • Words should only connect through intersections
    • The frontend does not mutate the grid but will be able to pass actions to the backend and return a new state
    • For instance: say a user starts off their grid by typing “CAT” and then “DOG.” These words don’t have common characters, so they cannot be connected. However, instead of erasing the user’s desire to incorporate “DOG,” the string gets tucked away and saved in a GArray

• • • Now our user types and enters “CADET.” The UI takes our list and passes it to the algorithm to start chewing on and deal onto the board anew. This time, allowing for “CAT,” “DOG,” and “CADET” to appear, without the user having to retype “DOG”

I went back and forth with myself on how to represent the puzzle’s state in memory and disk. To write a custom GObject, or not.

The Argument Against: Standard IpuzCrossword objects have a handle on grids and JSON saving, and one could write a new function that takes an array of strings and return a standard IpuzCrossword.

The Argument For: Revisiting the “CAT,” “DOG,” and “CADET” conundrum; say an educator is creating a puzzle for his/her/their class, and they have just one word out of 20 that don’t connect to current existing possibilities of intersecting words. If they save their puzzle, it transforms to a standard IpuzCrossword, and the floating word are permanently abandoned.

At the current moment, I want the puzzle to be its own vocab-style workspace. Therefore this would allow for the floating word to instead sit in the sidebar and wait for further instruction for a future inserted word that works, or to get deleted.

Of course, as I gain more insight about the library, states , and optimization within the codebase, this approach is subject to refinement.

With the release of 4.23.1, GTK’s renderer will come with a new feature that we’ve called snapping .

How does it work?

Snapping is enabled by calling gtk_snapshot_set_snap() . If enabled, it will slightly adjust the placement of rectangles when drawing so that they align with the pixel grid and don’t cover half a pixel.

Content drawn with GTK is scaled automatically by the desktop’s scale factor. But with the arrival of native fractional scaling, it is no longer possible to know if content is aligned to the pixel grid.

While that is usually not a problem, there are a few cases where it is:

Sprite grids

Gameeky is a learning game that plays on a grid. Unfortunately, on a fractionally scaled machine, it can end up looking like this:

Once those sprites are snapped to the pixel grid by rounding to the nearest pixel, the same image looks like this

Sharp images

Often Applications want to display images in a way that matches the pixels of the image 1:1 with pixels of the monitor. This is a challenge on a fractionally scaled display. Not only is it important to get the scale factor right, it’s also important to align the pixels correctly, or they will appear slightly blurry.

The use case is not just image viewers that want to offer a 1:1 zoom factor, but all applications that redirect drawing, from game emulators to viewers like Boxes or Connections .

Hardware optimizations

And finally, there are optimizations like graphics offload that rely on content being aligned to the pixel grid or the hardware cannot optimize them. So it is important to snap content to the pixel grid for those cases.

Why don’t we just always snap to the grid?

There is one big problem with automatic snapping: smoothness. Because snapping only works on full pixels, doing slow animations causes content to jump from one pixel to the next. And that causes jitter.

The main situation where one can see this is smooth scrolling, like in this example:

Summary

The next GTK release will offer a new way to tame the effects of fractional scaling.  Please try it out and let us know how it works!

While working on my GSoC project (rewriting the Pitivi timeline in Rust), I ran into an issue getting precise UI ticks that map to the absolute nanosecond timestamps of the video frames. Initially I hardcoded NTSC fractional math (24000/1001) to calculate the boundaries of frames.

This led to issues with truncated timestamps, and had a glaring issue with other framerates (like 30fps). I needed a more robust solution that could handle any framerate and provide accurate tick positions.

I assumed that I could extract the framerate directly from ges::Timeline , however there is no direct getter in the Rust bindings. After some digging, I discovered that the framerate is actually stored in the gst::Caps of the timeline's video stream as a gst::Fraction .

My Approach

The steps I used:

• Enumerate the timeline tracks ( timeline.tracks() )
• Filter for the video track (checking ges::TrackType::VIDEO )
• Read the track's restriction_caps
• Extract the gst::Fraction

My helper

I wrote a helper function to extract the framerate from the timeline:

pub fn get_fps(&self, timeline: &ges::Timeline) -> Option<(i128, i128)> {
    timeline
        .tracks()
        .into_iter()
        .find(|track| track.track_type().contains(ges::TrackType::VIDEO))
        .and_then(|track| {
            let caps = track.restriction_caps().or_else(|| track.caps())?;
            let structure = caps.structure(0)?;
            let fps = structure.get::<gst::Fraction>("framerate").ok()?;

            // Extract the safe numerator and denominator
            Some((fps.numer() as i128, fps.denom() as i128))
        })
}

// ... inside the timeline injection logic:
if let Some((fps_num, fps_denom)) = self.get_fps(timeline) {
    self.fps_num.set(fps_num.max(1) as i32);
    self.fps_denom.set(fps_denom.max(1) as i32);
} else {
    // Default to 23.976 if we can't find a valid framerate caps
    self.fps_num.set(24_000);
    self.fps_denom.set(1_001);
}

I make some assumptions here, such as only one video track existing, and that the framerate is always present in the caps. This solution made the tick spacing and labels line up with the timeline’s actual frame boundaries at any framerate.

I do not always want to know what time it is. This is a slightly awkward position for someone who keeps making clocks, but there we are. Quite often the useful answer is not 17:42 . It is “quarter to six”, “nearly lunch” or “you should probably start thinking about leaving”. The precise time is useful when catching trains, baking things and joining calls; the rest of the time it can be a bit much.

So I have been working on fuzzy time for a while. The first version I made was for the Pebble , which remains one of those devices that makes later technology feel slightly ashamed of itself. A small always-on screen, good battery life, physical buttons and just enough personality. It’s not tokyoflash after all.

The current versions are Fuzzy Time GB , a Wear OS watch face, and Fuzzy Clock GB , a GNOME Shell extension.

The Android version is quite a funny object internally. It is a Watch Face Format v2 face, so the APK has no app code:

android:hasCode="false"

The face itself is declarative XML. Since writing thirty-six thousand lines of watch face XML by hand would be a cry for help, there is a generator which writes the cases out from the same fuzzy time rules. For every hour and every five-minute bucket it emits the condition, text and separate interactive and ambient versions.

That sounds excessive until you look at the details; and then it still sounds excessive. There are lots of pernickety things that give this the correct GB locale to my ears. “Five Past Midnight” is a real phrase. 23:58 should say “Midnight”, and if the date is visible it should be tomorrow’s date. 11:58 should say “Noon”. “O’Clock” wants different spacing and weight from “Twenty-five To”. Ambient mode wants smaller, quieter text. A round watch face leaves less room than you think it does. The watch face has a few small choices rather than a settings cathedral: warm white, cool white, soft green, dim amber; system font or Arvo ; optional radial complication slots above and below the text. The range complications are deliberately arcs around the edge rather than little widgets in the middle. They can show useful things, but they should not make the face stop being mostly words and calm black space.

The GNOME version is the same idea on a different surface. It finds the existing clock label, listens to the same wall clock, respects the existing “show date” and “show weekday” settings, and changes the text. I have wanted to build something like this for years, partly because of Emmanuele Bassi’s word clock extension . That extension was great, but not quite the thing I wanted , so eventually I got around to making my own.

One of the few design decisions left that I helped on in main GNOME (which is much better now) is that the shutdown and logout dialogue only updates its timing every so often. It could update every second; the computer is quite capable of counting. But it’s much more pleasant when the number doesn’t twitch constantly while you are trying to decide whether you meant to press the button.

You can build both projects from source. I may choose to distribute them in a more structured fashion in future. The Android one is a minimal Wear OS watch face, and the GNOME one is a normal Shell extension that currently supports GNOME Shell 45 to 50.

About Me

Hello Everyone! I am Shivam, I am currently pursing my engineering in Electronics. I have been selected for GSoC 2026 for the port of GNOME-Gitg from GTK 3 to GTK 4. I am starting this blog in order to document my journey of porting Gitg . I have been contributing in GNOME from several months and in awe with the supportive and helpful nature of the community.

Project

As many of you probably know, Gitg is still using GTK3, which means it misses out on a lot of the improvements and features that came with GTK4. The main goal of this project is to port Gitg from GTK3 to GTK4 and then gradually modernize the application.

The scope of the project itself is quite large, and that’s honestly one of the most exciting parts for me. Working on this port will help me understand the application interacts with different libraries and components behind the scenes.

At the same time, I hope that this work will help the new contributors like me easier to get started contributing to the various GNOME projects

Conclusive Goal

The final goal of this project is to get Gitg building and running completely with GTK4 dependencies. At the moment, the application still fails to compile, which is expected since many GTK3 APIs are still present throughout the codebase.A separate GTK4 branch already exists where parts of the migration work have been started, and several components have already been adapted to GTK4. This project will continue building on top of that existing effort and gradually move the remaining parts of the application to the newer toolkit.

I would also like to sincerely thank the contributor(s) who have worked on the GTK4 porting work earlier. Their efforts created the foundation for this project, and I’ll be continuing from the work they have already done.

Thank You For Reading!

PS:- I would also like to thank Alberto Fanjul for mentoring me in this project and Felipe Borges for this time and support.