thesquash / stlwrt Goto Github PK

I usually spend 2 hours trying to compile anything even when it has a makefile, so I don't even know where to begin in compiling this. I really wanted to try it out. Any help in compiling would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Does this run existing Gtk 2 programs without recompiling them ?

If so it might be worth mentioning this explicitly and also showing some screenshots of existing apps.

It sounds like this may fill a similar neich to sdk_compat (which runs SDL 1.2 binaries on top of SDL 2)

Hi,

While obviously this hasn't been tested on account of not running yet, am I correct in stating that STLWRT is going to link to upstream Pango and use it for text rendering?

Pango 1.44 and up use Harfbuzz for hinting, and Harfbuzz doesn't support "full" or "strong" hinting, breaking kerning on some very common fonts like Tahoma in certain configurations.

This is especially noticeable with antialiasing turned off. It's certainly highly noticeable in my name.

It is even noticeable in this tiny little GTK3 program I made a while ago. Check out the spacing of the letters 'c' and 'e' in 'cancel,' and also the capital 'C' at the beginning. The 'p' in 'gimp' is also messed up slightly.

For comparison, I rewrote it recently in FLTK 1.3 to get faster startup times, and ended up with a simpler program to write and better kerning to boot:

Anyway, I guess my question here is if there's anything that can be done on the toolkit side of Cairo to coerce text into better kerning/hinting, or if there's any other solution planned. This was all caused, apparently, when Cairo (edit: Pango) switched from FreeType to Harfbuzz for hinting (I am not familiar enough with Harfbuzz or GNOME to understand their reasoning for the move away from FreeType).

I suspect something can be, because I notice that Seamonkey (and Firefox) don't appear to have the issue despite also using GTK3 (except in the file chooser). But that could just be by avoiding Pango altogether, for all I know. After all, this is XUL stuff.

I recognize that STLWRT is taking a lot longer than planned, so I put this up as an impetus for me to get back to work and code whenever I have a spare minute!

This issue is also to provide periodic status updates on the project. It will be closed (but not deleted) when the first stable release is produced.

The current timeline suggests a working, but testing-status, version of STLWRT, version 0.90.0, will be available on 12/25/2020 or whereabouts.

Feel free to add commentary to this issue if you have any; this in an open-discussion issue!

I have been looking through the repo a bit but have found no Makefile or something similar, how does one build STLWRT (even if it's still buggy)?
And how do you go about running/testing your code, LD_PRELOAD?

Have a nice day,
Ben

Hi,

I think this project is great and it would be a huge thing if it could replace GTK3 and GTK4. However, maintaining a GTK fork alone seems a Sisyphean task to me. Unfortunately I don't have the expertise the make useful contributions, however I would be willing to donate (smaller) sums on a monthly basis to help you keep going and I think there might be other people out there, dissatisfied with current GTK trends who would be willing to do the same.

So would you consider setting up paypal/buymeacoffee.com or whatever other scheme to accept donations?

Thanks for this project, it will definitely help #LinuxUsability.

Wondering how stlwrt is addressing the menus hidden behind hamburger icons (in my opinion easily the worst design decision in Gtk 3, and proven to be a really bad idea for usability).

Would it be possible to export the contents of menus hidden behind hamburger icons to the global menu bar, just as if it was a regular application menu?

I assume convergence is not within the scope of this application, so this question will be moot...

On low powered arm devices such as the Pinephone using the GPU to offload rendering of applications can greatly reduce resource usage and increase power efficiency. Is GPU acceleration something that is possible with this toolkit in the future?

Is it supposed to be built and installed globally to replace libgtk at the moment?

Are there Python bindings available or planned?

https://twitter.com/Ericbsd/status/1497560282947858434

It's a well known issue that GTK has no thumbnail support in the file picker dialogue. However, there is a positive solution, someone already made a patch along with a forked GTK2/3 that has thumbnail support in the file picker. All you need to do is two things:

1. Apply the patch provided here: https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk/tree/gtk2-filechooser-icon-view
2. Somehow have the file picker generate the thumbnails when a directory is loaded as noted at the bottom of the link because you would otherwise need to patch glib2 as well.

1. Would in the future there be a possibility of full compatibility with all GTK2 and GTK3 applications?
2. What is your goal for GTK themes? Support only GTK2 themes? Only GTK3 themes? Or both?

I'm considering in the future maintaining personally either GTK2 LXDE or an older version of XFCE, either on this account or a different one. I think this project will be a big help when and if I do so. Thank you.