Spooky season is over, let’s see what scary changes I made last month

Nautilus

I finally installed GNOME OS this month. It runs very smoothly on my machine and is a pleasant experience so far. But when I opened nautilus on this fresh setup, I realized that it sorts files and folders interleaved, something I assumed would no longer be the case as the default was changed 5(!) years ago. Obviously I had to find out what is going wrong and the culprit turned out to be nautilus trying to migrate legacy GTK3 settings on fresh setups. This no doubt made sense when António Fernandes gloriously ported to GTK4, but since that was almost 5 years ago, I now dropped considering GTK3 settings, meaning fresh setups will finally see folders sorted before files by default

Related to folder sorting, I was very excited to see Christian Hergert added sections to GtkGridView in GTK. I long thought that sections would be very useful to have, as it allows to show folders and files separate. I played around with them a bit, but still need to rework it before other maintainers are happy with it.

When testing the preferences dialog in another language which commonly uses longer words than English (yes, it was German) I noticed that the recently adopted AdwComboRow for the “Action to Open Items” doesn’t scale well to smaller sizes. After some feedback from Philipp Sauberzweig it now uses the new AdwActionRow:body property. Philipp also suggested more adjustments for the performance section combo rows, making the dialog now look this

I also had a call with GNOME designer Tobias Bernard for a live test session of the new app chooser and we adjusted the mockup to the constraints we are working with (and then some). I am optimistic that it will be finalized by next month

Other things

• Expanded nautilus CI with Blueprint and meson formatting
• Assured property dialogs are sized correctly
• Suggested to add Ctrl+Shift+L as a shortcut to open the search filter popover
• Suggested to add Ctrl+Shift+R as an alternative renaming shortcut
• Fixed selection when deleting the last item
• Together with Khalid Abu Shawarib fixed scaling of thumbnails in the nightly version
• Some CI fixes
• Various cleanups regarding includes, gobject-linter and more

Sushi

During writing last month’s blog post I noticed and fixed some graphical inconsistencies in the icon. I also made sure we only offer to copy error messages when we actually have any. Apart from that and a bug fix release, I mostly reviewed MRs from Tau Gärtli and Corey Berla.

There is one more thing that Tau and I hacked on together in person, but it’s not ready yet, so all I have is this teaser text and a rainbow selfie

libadwaita

I have once again stumbled upon issues with dialog sizing. Basically, what I expect dialogs to scale with their content. No problem, AdwDialog:follows-content-size has you covered. But what I also expect them to do, is to have a certain width when space allows for it. GTK calls this the “natural” size, the size a dialog/widget has, when it is not contstraint.

The issue now is that the dialog’s content is commonly made up of many nested widgets. It even commonly includes a clamping widget that assures nested widgets don’t grow too wide. The natural size of this composition of various widgets is not easy to define or predict. So, when using follows-content-size the dialog might often end up small, even in situations where that doesn’t really look all that great.

What I implented as a suggested workaround is to always strive for allocating at least the dialog’s content-width and content-height, even when follows-content-size is set. If the dialog’s content grows beyond those dimensions, then it is still resized accordingly.

Other

• I fixed up a GTK MR from the previous month that adds gdk_keyval_is_alias, a check that builds on the mechanism of the recently introduced gdk_keyval_get_aliases which allows to check for keyval alternatives (merged), e.g. to cover alternative numpad keys
• Fixed a GVariant leak that caused one of the many CI pipeline failures this month
• I made gobject-linter correctly handle functions declared as external
• I fixed the gexiv2 CI pipeline while changing the default branch name
• Fixed some leaks in gnome-autoar and made the CI GNOME OS-based

Roadmap

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AI Summary

On their way onward, the group decides that having their folders and proviant all mixed up together is not a particulary useful way of organizing their possessions. Someone suggests to have completely separate, but for now they agree on at least not mixing them. The group meets Adwy, the one and only giant tortoise in these lands. It is very content to meet them. Maybe that is because Autoar realized it is the 2020s and not the 1920s and stopped wearing a Fedora.

Important note: All statements in this blog are fictional.