I wanted to start this post with saying September was a bit of a slower month, as I was on vacation for a good chunk of it, but turns out that still quiet some things happened

Nautilus

The pathbar completion improvements I mentioned in the last post landed. Completions are now reused when in the same directory. On top of that, further suggestions are now directly shown when accepting a previous suggestion.

I also created a (somewhat hacky) solution to immediately start completing when navigating to the end of the entry, which did not land yet. I also finished the (initial) graphical app chooser changes, which now has a “Show All” tile. This needs design input, but testing turns out to be a bit tricky as the Flatpak version uses the app chooser portal. Meanwhile, the code cleanup part of the app chooser rework already landed after Khalid Abu Shawarib reviewed it. In general Khalid reviews most of my nautilus MR, which I am very thankful for.

Other than that I…

• Created an MR that adds support for the star column in Recent and Search and also allows hiding the column altogether.
• Fixed up a cleanup of the audio/video extension plugin, which drops custom content type lists and gives it a more generic name.
• Landed more code cleanups related to how file metadata is set.
• Made use of SPDX licence specifiers consistently across the whole project.
• Continued work on the xdg-user-dirs replacement MR.

Sushi

As sushi is (currently) only ever presented as a dialog to nautilus, it didn’t need an app icon in the past, but with modern app distribution approaches (it’s installable via Flathub) that no longer applies. I filed an app icon request some months ago, in which Jakub Steiner and I together now jammed up a shiny new icon:

 

My composition suggestion Jakub’s refined version

 

Sushi tries to show cover art when possible. This also included the capability to download cover art (something I fixed in July but seemingly forgot to mention). The downloaded covers were not stored in the file – a previewer shouldn’t modify files after all – so it was a rather obscure feature to have.

Fetching covers of course involved sending queries to other people’s computers, which might be unexpected default behavior, especially since html previews started asking for confirmation before fetching web content. Thus, Tau Gärtli and I agreed on removing this niche feature. As a replacement, I implemented something that seems more useful to me – support for cover art files that are in the same folder as the song, such as folder.jpg or cover.png.

Sometimes file previewing fails due to various reasons (missing codecs, corrupted file, …). Instead of the previous dedicated page, I adjusted sushi’s error handling so that basic file information is still shown, while the error is indicated by a banner:

Other small changes:

• I fixed a bug of my own creation that prevented some mouse interactions. The fix is included in the 51.1 release that landed on Flathub.
• Sushi now use the default .Devel developer version suffix
• Renderer loading times are limited now, preventing infinite load screens

gnome-autoar

Libarchive, the library used by gnome-autoar supports multi-threaded compression for some file types (7zip, xz, zstd), so I added an option to enable this in gnome-autoar. If all goes well nautilus will make use of this soon.

I also fixed a signal parameter bug that was blocking a gnome-shell MR. The cause was that gnome-autoar correctly emits its signals in the main thread, but didn’t wait for responses in the asynchronous thread that initiated the signaling. For simple fire-and-forget signals that wouldn’t be an issue, but not only do some of gnome-autoar’s signals have return values, there even is one particularly peculiar case of a signal with an out parameter – something I couldn’t find another example of in other projects.

I also created a handful of cleanup MRs, which bring the repository up to the standard of a modern (GObject-based) C project: a gobject-linter CI job, SPDX licence specifiers, G_LOG_DOMAIN usage, code cleanups and more.

Roadmap

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AI Summary

Freed from his shackles, Autoar learns that they all along had the capability to do multiple things at the same time. With this, cleaning up the library is no problem and even the strangely wound looking glass on the signaling lookout gets fixed. Through it the group can be seen moving into the depths of the gnome caves. With them they carry rations in the form of paper scrolls, depicting such accurate portrays of sushi that fiction and reality is not distinguishable to mortal digestion systems.

Important note: All statements in this blog are fictional.