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Catfish 1.4.7 Released

  • January 27, 2019
  • Sean Davis

What’s New?

General

  • Cleaner, easier to read manpage contents
  • Information about the --path command-line flag was added to help and the manpage
  • Updated AppStream components to align with the latest specification
  • Replaced project URLs with HTTPS where possible

Desktop Integration

  • The window layout now respects the current desktop (Xfce #14486)
  • A headerbar layout is used for Budgie, GNOME, and Pantheon
  • All other desktops use the traditional titlebar layout
  • This option can be overridden using the use-headerbar option
    in the Catfish configuration file (~/.config/catfish/catfish.rc)
  • Files can now be dragged into other applications (Xfce #14492)
  • For file managers, the files will usually be copied to that location
  • For other applications, the files will be opened by the application

Performance

  • Thumbnails will now only be generated when the thumbnail view is active (Xfce #14689)
  • Added /dev to list of standard excluded directories
  • Files within /dev can still be searched if explicitly selected by the user

Bug Fixes

  • Quoted search strings now allow for searching for specific phrases, instead of searching for actual quote characters (Xfce #14501)
  • The file context menu can now be opened multiple times (Xfce #14621)
  • Fix crash as startup when Catfish enables multi-file selection (LP #1753163)

Translation Updates

Catfish 1.4.7 Released

Albanian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian

Downloads

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

Catfish 1.4.7 Released

  • January 27, 2019
  • Sean Davis

What’s New?

General

  • Cleaner, easier to read manpage contents
  • Information about the --path command-line flag was added to help and the manpage
  • Updated AppStream components to align with the latest specification
  • Replaced project URLs with HTTPS where possible

Desktop Integration

  • The window layout now respects the current desktop (Xfce #14486)
  • A headerbar layout is used for Budgie, GNOME, and Pantheon
  • All other desktops use the traditional titlebar layout
  • This option can be overridden using the use-headerbar option
    in the Catfish configuration file (~/.config/catfish/catfish.rc)
  • Files can now be dragged into other applications (Xfce #14492)
  • For file managers, the files will usually be copied to that location
  • For other applications, the files will be opened by the application

Performance

  • Thumbnails will now only be generated when the thumbnail view is active (Xfce #14689)
  • Added /dev to list of standard excluded directories
  • Files within /dev can still be searched if explicitly selected by the user

Bug Fixes

  • Quoted search strings now allow for searching for specific phrases, instead of searching for actual quote characters (Xfce #14501)
  • The file context menu can now be opened multiple times (Xfce #14621)
  • Fix crash as startup when Catfish enables multi-file selection (LP #1753163)

Translation Updates

Catfish 1.4.7 Released

Albanian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian

Downloads

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

Exo 0.12.4 Released

  • January 20, 2019
  • Sean Davis

Exo 0.12.4 is now available with an improved icon view, better icon rendering, and reduced disk usage. Come and get it!

What’s New?

General

  • Exo once again uses the same thumbnail directories as other applications (Xfce #14799), resulting in reduced disk usage.
    • Where everything else moved to ~/.cache/thumbnails quite some time ago, Exo continued to use ~/.thumbnails. Enjoy all the extra disk space!

Bug Fixes

  • ExoCellRendererIcon: Fix highlight rendering with GTK 3 (Xfce #14971)
  • ExoIconView: Fix search popup placement (Xfce #14994)
    • Additionally, a long-standing bug where the type-ahead search widget would be drawn partially off the screen for maximized windows, has been fixed!

Translation Updates

Belarusian, Catalan, Chinese (China), German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Kannada, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Thai

Downloads

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

 

Exo 0.12.4 Released

  • January 19, 2019
  • Sean Davis

What’s New?

General

  • Exo once again uses the same thumbnail directories as other applications (Xfce #14799), resulting in reduced disk usage.
  • Where everything else moved to ~/.cache/thumbnails quite some time ago, Exo continued to use ~/.thumbnails. Enjoy all the extra disk space!

Bug Fixes

  • ExoCellRendererIcon: Fix highlight rendering with GTK 3 (Xfce #14971)
  • ExoIconView: Fix search popup placement (Xfce #14994)
  • Additionally, a long-standing bug where the type-ahead search widget would be drawn partially off the screen for maximized windows, has been fixed!
Exo 0.12.4 Released
Exo 0.12.4 Released
Before & After

Translation Updates

Exo 0.12.4 Released

Belarusian, Catalan, Chinese (China), German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Kannada, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Thai

Downloads

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

Exo 0.12.4 Released

  • January 19, 2019
  • Sean Davis

What’s New?

General

  • Exo once again uses the same thumbnail directories as other applications (Xfce #14799), resulting in reduced disk usage.
  • Where everything else moved to ~/.cache/thumbnails quite some time ago, Exo continued to use ~/.thumbnails. Enjoy all the extra disk space!

Bug Fixes

  • ExoCellRendererIcon: Fix highlight rendering with GTK 3 (Xfce #14971)
  • ExoIconView: Fix search popup placement (Xfce #14994)
  • Additionally, a long-standing bug where the type-ahead search widget would be drawn partially off the screen for maximized windows, has been fixed!
Exo 0.12.4 Released
Exo 0.12.4 Released
Before & After

Translation Updates

Exo 0.12.4 Released

Belarusian, Catalan, Chinese (China), German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Kannada, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Thai

Downloads

Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review

  • January 2, 2019
  • Sean Davis

2018 has been a busy year for Xfce & Xubuntu. As we enter 2019 and continue to inch closer to Xfce 4.14, let’s look back at one of the busiest development years in a while.

January

News

Major Releases

  • MenuLibre 2.1.4 introduced some useful new features to the popular menu editor, including a Test Launcher button to try out a launcher before saving and the Parsing Errors dialog to easily identify menu configuration issues.

Other Notable Releases

The Parsing Errors dialog in MenuLibre simplifies menu cleanup and debugging.

February

News

Major Releases

  • Exo 0.12.0 was the first stable Xfce 4.14 release for the Xfce application development library. The new release included support for both GTK+ 2 and 3, and added Brave, Geary, Google Chrome, and Vivaldi to the natively supported application defaults.
  • MenuLibre 2.1.5 expanded it’s support of desktop environments. With this release, MenuLibre’s powerful menu editing options are available for Budgie, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, LXQt, MATE, Pantheon, Unity, and Xfce.

Other Notable Releases

March

News

Major Releases

  • MenuLibre 2.2.0 was finally released with an expansive list of improvements. Expanded desktop environment support, easy window identification, launcher testing, and parsing error reporting are just a few of the key improvements.
  • Parole Media Player 1.0.0 included playback performance updates, automatic video output selection, and improved podcast and live stream support. The new Mini Mode reduces the player to a small window that simultaneously stays out of the way and in reach.
  • Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.4.0 introduced device manage and MPRIS support to the audio management plugin. Available input and output devices can be selected from the plugin menu, immediately moving streams to the new device. MPRIS support adds media player controls for supported applications.
  • Xfce Settings 4.12.2, 4.12.3, and 4.13.2 improved multi-monitor support for both stable and development releases. The mouse cursor can now be shown with the press of a key, configurable with the Xfce Settings Manager.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce PulseAudio Plugin
The Xfce PulseAudio Plugin makes it easy to manage devices and play your jams.

April

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”, an LTS release supported for 3 years, was released with 32-bit and 64-bit downloads available. This release included some new desktop applications: Some MATE components replaced their GNOME counterparts for improved desktop consistency; Xfce PulseAudio Plugin replaced the Sound Indicator; and the Xfce Notifications plugin, featuring a new Do Not Disturb mode, was added to the panel.

Other Notable Releases

Wallpaper Contest
The results of the Xubuntu 18.04 wallpaper contest were exceptional.

May

This was the first month I started published monthly news roundups. For an in-depth look at May’s development progress, check out the June Development Update.

News

Notable Releases

June

June Development Roundup

Major Releases

  • Thunar 1.8.0 and 1.8.1 were the first stable GTK+ 3 releases of the Xfce file manager, offering major usability and developer-friendly improvements. The pathbar now includes navigation buttons and a much tidier location selector. GObject Introspection for Thunar’s plugin library makes it possible to develop plugins in a number of programming languages.
  • Xfce Settings 4.12.4 and 4.13.4 featured improvements to display manufacturer recognition. The mappings were updated and various manufacturer names were simplified for better screen real estate. 4.13.4 introduced Xrandr display scaling, making it possible to scale the X display and all applications.

Other Notable Releases

A comparison of Thunar’s old and new pathbar. Image credit: Andre Miranda (see link to Thunar 1.8 release announcement)

July

July Development Roundup

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.04.1, the first point release in the Bionic Beaver series, became available. At this time, users of a prior release should have received an upgrade notice. This release included several stability and performance improvements.
  • Xfwm 4.13.1 included a massive amount of updates, including a full port to GTK+ 3 and various fixes. This component is one of the critical pieces of the Xfce 4.14 release, so it’s great to see it humming along.

Other Notable Releases

August

August Development Roundup

Notable Releases

September

September & October Development Roundup

News

Notable Releases

Elementary Xfce’s Manila folder icons headline September’s development updates.

October

September & October Development Roundup

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.10 “Cosmic Cuttlefish” featured a number of appearance updates and Xfce 4.14 components. Our icon theme, elementary-xfce, was updated with new manila folder icons and optimized, resulting in a smaller install size and improved performance. Many more GTK+ 3 Xfce applications were included.
  • Xfce Screensaver 0.1.0 (and 0.1.1) was announced as a new screen locker and screensaver for Xfce. This application is a port of MATE Screensaver, adapted to tightly integrate with the Xfce desktop. It shares theming with LightDM GTK+ Greeter to guarantee a consistent login and lock experience for users of both.
  • Xfce Settings 4.13.5 featured the new display profiles: saved multi-monitor layouts that are automatically applied when a new monitor configuration is detected. This works with multi-monitor layouts as well as switching a laptop to use only the external display when connected.

Other Notable Releases

November

Major Releases

  • Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 is the first beta release of the new Xfce Screensaver. It features an expanded configuration dialog, better support for X11 Screensaver and XDG Screensaver, and fully documented functionality. With a focus on improved code quality, contributors should have a much easier time with the project going forward.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce Screensaver is compatible with all Xscreensaver themes.

December

News

  • Lubuntu and Xubuntu announced that they will no longer ship 32-bit ISOs for Ubuntu 19.04 and onwards. Ubuntu 18.04 will continue to be supported for the 3-year LTS support window.
  • André Miranda published The Ultimate Contributor’s Guide to Xfce, which is definitely a worthwhile read for new and existing contributors.

Notable Releases

Cheers to 2019

Look out for Xfce 4.14, we’re so close! Keep an eye out for more updates in the coming months.

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review

  • January 2, 2019
  • Sean Davis

January

News

Major Releases

  • MenuLibre 2.1.4 introduced some useful new features to the popular menu editor, including a Test Launcher button to try out a launcher before saving and the Parsing Errors dialog to easily identify menu configuration issues.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
The Parsing Errors dialog in MenuLibre simplifies menu cleanup and debugging.

February

News

Major Releases

  • Exo 0.12.0 was the first stable Xfce 4.14 release for the Xfce application development library. The new release included support for both GTK+ 2 and 3, and added Brave, Geary, Google Chrome, and Vivaldi to the natively supported application defaults.
  • MenuLibre 2.1.5 expanded it’s support of desktop environments. With this release, MenuLibre’s powerful menu editing options are available for Budgie, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, LXQt, MATE, Pantheon, Unity, and Xfce.

Other Notable Releases

March

News

Major Releases

  • MenuLibre 2.2.0 was finally released with an expansive list of improvements. Expanded desktop environment support, easy window identification, launcher testing, and parsing error reporting are just a few of the key improvements.
  • Parole Media Player 1.0.0 included playback performance updates, automatic video output selection, and improved podcast and live stream support. The new Mini Mode reduces the player to a small window that simultaneously stays out of the way and in reach.
  • Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.4.0 introduced device manage and MPRIS support to the audio management plugin. Available input and output devices can be selected from the plugin menu, immediately moving streams to the new device. MPRIS support adds media player controls for supported applications.
  • Xfce Settings 4.12.2, 4.12.3, and 4.13.2 improved multi-monitor support for both stable and development releases. The mouse cursor can now be shown with the press of a key, configurable with the Xfce Settings Manager.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
The Xfce PulseAudio Plugin makes it easy to manage devices and play your jams.

April

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”, an LTS release supported for 3 years, was released with 32-bit and 64-bit downloads available. This release included some new desktop applications: Some MATE components replaced their GNOME counterparts for improved desktop consistency; Xfce PulseAudio Plugin replaced the Sound Indicator; and the Xfce Notifications plugin, featuring a new Do Not Disturb mode, was added to the panel.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
The results of the Xubuntu 18.04 wallpaper contest were exceptional.

May

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review

This was the first month I started published monthly news roundups. For an in-depth look at May’s development progress, check out the June Development Update.

News

Notable Releases

June

June Development Roundup

Major Releases

  • Thunar 1.8.0 and 1.8.1 were the first stable GTK+ 3 releases of the Xfce file manager, offering major usability and developer-friendly improvements. The pathbar now includes navigation buttons and a much tidier location selector. GObject Introspection for Thunar’s plugin library makes it possible to develop plugins in a number of programming languages.
  • Xfce Settings 4.12.4 and 4.13.4 featured improvements to display manufacturer recognition. The mappings were updated and various manufacturer names were simplified for better screen real estate. 4.13.4 introduced Xrandr display scaling, making it possible to scale the X display and all applications.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
A comparison of Thunar’s old and new pathbar. Image credit: Andre Miranda (see link to Thunar 1.8 release announcement)

July

July Development Roundup

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.04.1, the first point release in the Bionic Beaver series, became available. At this time, users of a prior release should have received an upgrade notice. This release included several stability and performance improvements.
  • Xfwm 4.13.1 included a massive amount of updates, including a full port to GTK+ 3 and various fixes. This component is one of the critical pieces of the Xfce 4.14 release, so it’s great to see it humming along.

Other Notable Releases

August

August Development Roundup

Notable Releases

September

September & October Development Roundup

News

Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
Elementary Xfce’s Manila folder icons headline September’s development updates.

October

September & October Development Roundup

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.10 “Cosmic Cuttlefish” featured a number of appearance updates and Xfce 4.14 components. Our icon theme, elementary-xfce, was updated with new manila folder icons and optimized, resulting in a smaller install size and improved performance. Many more GTK+ 3 Xfce applications were included.
  • Xfce Screensaver 0.1.0 (and 0.1.1) was announced as a new screen locker and screensaver for Xfce. This application is a port of MATE Screensaver, adapted to tightly integrate with the Xfce desktop. It shares theming with LightDM GTK+ Greeter to guarantee a consistent login and lock experience for users of both.
  • Xfce Settings 4.13.5 featured the new display profiles: saved multi-monitor layouts that are automatically applied when a new monitor configuration is detected. This works with multi-monitor layouts as well as switching a laptop to use only the external display when connected.

Other Notable Releases

November

Major Releases

  • Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 is the first beta release of the new Xfce Screensaver. It features an expanded configuration dialog, better support for X11 Screensaver and XDG Screensaver, and fully documented functionality. With a focus on improved code quality, contributors should have a much easier time with the project going forward.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
Xfce Screensaver is compatible with all Xscreensaver themes.

December

News

  • Lubuntu and Xubuntu announced that they will no longer ship 32-bit ISOs for Ubuntu 19.04 and onwards. Ubuntu 18.04 will continue to be supported for the 3-year LTS support window.
  • André Miranda published The Ultimate Contributor’s Guide to Xfce, which is definitely a worthwhile read for new and existing contributors.

Notable Releases

Cheers to 2019

Look out for Xfce 4.14, we’re so close! Keep an eye out for more updates in the coming months.

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review

  • January 2, 2019
  • Sean Davis

January

News

Major Releases

  • MenuLibre 2.1.4 introduced some useful new features to the popular menu editor, including a Test Launcher button to try out a launcher before saving and the Parsing Errors dialog to easily identify menu configuration issues.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
The Parsing Errors dialog in MenuLibre simplifies menu cleanup and debugging.

February

News

Major Releases

  • Exo 0.12.0 was the first stable Xfce 4.14 release for the Xfce application development library. The new release included support for both GTK+ 2 and 3, and added Brave, Geary, Google Chrome, and Vivaldi to the natively supported application defaults.
  • MenuLibre 2.1.5 expanded it’s support of desktop environments. With this release, MenuLibre’s powerful menu editing options are available for Budgie, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, LXQt, MATE, Pantheon, Unity, and Xfce.

Other Notable Releases

March

News

Major Releases

  • MenuLibre 2.2.0 was finally released with an expansive list of improvements. Expanded desktop environment support, easy window identification, launcher testing, and parsing error reporting are just a few of the key improvements.
  • Parole Media Player 1.0.0 included playback performance updates, automatic video output selection, and improved podcast and live stream support. The new Mini Mode reduces the player to a small window that simultaneously stays out of the way and in reach.
  • Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.4.0 introduced device manage and MPRIS support to the audio management plugin. Available input and output devices can be selected from the plugin menu, immediately moving streams to the new device. MPRIS support adds media player controls for supported applications.
  • Xfce Settings 4.12.2, 4.12.3, and 4.13.2 improved multi-monitor support for both stable and development releases. The mouse cursor can now be shown with the press of a key, configurable with the Xfce Settings Manager.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
The Xfce PulseAudio Plugin makes it easy to manage devices and play your jams.

April

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”, an LTS release supported for 3 years, was released with 32-bit and 64-bit downloads available. This release included some new desktop applications: Some MATE components replaced their GNOME counterparts for improved desktop consistency; Xfce PulseAudio Plugin replaced the Sound Indicator; and the Xfce Notifications plugin, featuring a new Do Not Disturb mode, was added to the panel.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
The results of the Xubuntu 18.04 wallpaper contest were exceptional.

May

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review

This was the first month I started published monthly news roundups. For an in-depth look at May’s development progress, check out the June Development Update.

News

Notable Releases

June

June Development Roundup

Major Releases

  • Thunar 1.8.0 and 1.8.1 were the first stable GTK+ 3 releases of the Xfce file manager, offering major usability and developer-friendly improvements. The pathbar now includes navigation buttons and a much tidier location selector. GObject Introspection for Thunar’s plugin library makes it possible to develop plugins in a number of programming languages.
  • Xfce Settings 4.12.4 and 4.13.4 featured improvements to display manufacturer recognition. The mappings were updated and various manufacturer names were simplified for better screen real estate. 4.13.4 introduced Xrandr display scaling, making it possible to scale the X display and all applications.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
A comparison of Thunar’s old and new pathbar. Image credit: Andre Miranda (see link to Thunar 1.8 release announcement)

July

July Development Roundup

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.04.1, the first point release in the Bionic Beaver series, became available. At this time, users of a prior release should have received an upgrade notice. This release included several stability and performance improvements.
  • Xfwm 4.13.1 included a massive amount of updates, including a full port to GTK+ 3 and various fixes. This component is one of the critical pieces of the Xfce 4.14 release, so it’s great to see it humming along.

Other Notable Releases

August

August Development Roundup

Notable Releases

September

September & October Development Roundup

News

Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
Elementary Xfce’s Manila folder icons headline September’s development updates.

October

September & October Development Roundup

News

Major Releases

  • Xubuntu 18.10 “Cosmic Cuttlefish” featured a number of appearance updates and Xfce 4.14 components. Our icon theme, elementary-xfce, was updated with new manila folder icons and optimized, resulting in a smaller install size and improved performance. Many more GTK+ 3 Xfce applications were included.
  • Xfce Screensaver 0.1.0 (and 0.1.1) was announced as a new screen locker and screensaver for Xfce. This application is a port of MATE Screensaver, adapted to tightly integrate with the Xfce desktop. It shares theming with LightDM GTK+ Greeter to guarantee a consistent login and lock experience for users of both.
  • Xfce Settings 4.13.5 featured the new display profiles: saved multi-monitor layouts that are automatically applied when a new monitor configuration is detected. This works with multi-monitor layouts as well as switching a laptop to use only the external display when connected.

Other Notable Releases

November

Major Releases

  • Xfce Screensaver 0.1.3 is the first beta release of the new Xfce Screensaver. It features an expanded configuration dialog, better support for X11 Screensaver and XDG Screensaver, and fully documented functionality. With a focus on improved code quality, contributors should have a much easier time with the project going forward.

Other Notable Releases

Xfce & Xubuntu 2018 Year In Review
Xfce Screensaver is compatible with all Xscreensaver themes.

December

News

  • Lubuntu and Xubuntu announced that they will no longer ship 32-bit ISOs for Ubuntu 19.04 and onwards. Ubuntu 18.04 will continue to be supported for the 3-year LTS support window.
  • André Miranda published The Ultimate Contributor’s Guide to Xfce, which is definitely a worthwhile read for new and existing contributors.

Notable Releases

Cheers to 2019

Look out for Xfce 4.14, we’re so close! Keep an eye out for more updates in the coming months.

New xfce4-panel development release

  • January 2, 2019
  • Simon Steinbeiß

What better way to start a new year than with a release? 🙂

xfce4-panel 4.13.4

After patching up xfce4-settings and finishing the “primary display” story with the patches against xfdesktop I decided to turn to the panel and continue making it 4.14-ready. Next stop: xfce4-panel 4.13.4.

New plugin icon size feature (plugin devs continue reading)

A few things had bugged me there for a while, for one the lack of consistent icon sizing. What the new “icon size” property I implemented gives you is a way to set one icon size per panel instance, so you can have e.g. a 60px panel with 48px icons, or a 32px panel with 16px icons (which gives the icons more padding/breathing room visually). If you set icon sizing to “automatic” (the default value) the panel will try to calculate meaningful sizes for your icons based on the panel size, as before.

Preferences Dialog with the new icon option
32px panel with 16px plugin icons

 

 

 

 

So while the panel’s API call xfce_panel_plugin_get_icon_size has been around for a while in the 4.13 cycle, I extended this now to also handle fixed sizes set by the user per panel instance.
I highly encourage every plugin developer/maintainer to use the API call mentioned above in their panel instead of custom size calculations, as it will lead to consistent sizing of all panel plugins per panel.
You can find examples of its usage here (panel core plugin) and here (external plugin).
The logic is always the same:
1) Connect to the size-changed signal
2) Get the icon size with xfce_panel_plugin_get_icon_size
3) Set the plugin’s icon with gtk_image_set_pixel_size

Correct menu positioning (again, plugin devs please read)

Luckily I’m not the only one currently hacking away on the panel. So another thing Alistair was fixing is the menu positioning on the panel’s core plugins. This is however a fix that all plugin developers/maintainers should pull in against their plugin. It leads to consistent positioning of the plugin menus in general and in overflow situations. You can find a good example for the correct usage of gtk_menu_popup_at_widget (which is used for showing plugin and other menus) here.

Tasklist fixes

After deciding to use the panel’s “Window Buttons” (aka “tasklist”) plugin more to test its stability I managed to fix a few bugs in window grouping. For instance the buttons of grouped windows now support the “active”, “minimized” and “urgent/blinking” states and are consequently more consistent with ungrouped buttons.
I also dug a little into libwnck – which we rely on for the app icons and the grouping in tasklist – and was able to get us high resolution application icons. While it worked fine for a single panel instance or for multiple tasklist instances with the same icon sizes, adding multiple tasklist plugins with different icon sizes led libwnck into a signal loop. Due to this unfortunate bug (or: mis-implementation) I had to revert this commit/feature. Ultimately the issue has to be resolved in libwnck – or alternatively we may come up with a separate tasklist-based plugin that relies on bamf instead of libwnck (future plan).

Small theming updates

Apart from the things mentioned above, I have also introduced some new CSS style classes which can be used by themes/themers.

To be more concrete, for orientation-specific theming (e.g. margins or paddings) you can now use .xfce4-panel.horizontal and .xfce4-panel.vertical.
For the tasklist I have introduced a group-buttons class which you can use to visually distinguish single-window buttons from group-buttons. This is useful as the behavior of those two buttons is different (group buttons pop up a menu with all associated windows, single-window buttons focus the window in question).

Lots of deprecation, bug fixes and translation updates

Finally, we also managed to fix a lot of bugs and deprecations in the code (thanks Alistair!).

Get it while it’s hot!
https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/tag/?h=xfce4-panel-4.13.4

The Ultimate Contributor’s Guide to Xfce

  • December 3, 2018
  • André Miranda

Once in a while someone comes around and ask hey, I love Xfce and would like to contribute, but where do I start? How can I be of use? How can I implement a fancy new feature?, I have no doubt the answer is 42. Unfortunately, we don’t have a supercomputer (and millions of years) to distill a meaning from that one-size-fits-all answer, therefore to offer proper guidance, some questions should be asked first, e.g. What exactly do you want to improve? Do you have any programming skills? Besides programming, how else would you like to help? It’s been a long time since I’ve been planning to write a comprehensive guide, I hope this to be helpful to hitchhikers and new contributors. As any open source project, there are several ways to collaborate, everyone is welcome to help in any or many ways they are able, in this guide I’m going to explain and give hints for all contribution forms I can think of.

Translation

Our translators do an amazing work, most of major languages are constantly updated, I really appreciate their tirelessly effort. But don’t feel unmotivated, there is always room for improvement, especially if you speak any of the not so updated languages.

Xfce uses gettext which generates .po files from source code. You can view those files from any component repository, for example Thunar.

Fortunately, translators need not know terminal commands or any complex tool, since Xfce translations are handled in Transifex, a web-based translation platform. At that link you can see the overview of the current status of translations.

Once you sign up, you can ask to join a translation team. Be patient, it may take a while for a coordinator to approve your request. If you think your request is taking longer than it should, say a couple weeks, please poke us via the translation mailing list.

After joining a team, Transifex should be intuitive, there is even a comments section in case of doubts for a particular text to be translated, but developers are not notified. In this case I recommend using the mailing list or bug tracker.

For further details check the documentation page about translations.

Donations

If you have spare coins to donate, the official way to do so is via Xfce’s bountysource page. You can donate to the organization itself or put a reward of a specific bug. The money is more than welcome, but we are not actively making use, hence I hint donors to place rewards for things they expect (bug fixes, features, etc). Even if you make a hefty donation, we would be very thankful, but this is an open source project 100% run by volunteers, no one is implicitly obliged to act upon your requests.

Bug Reporting / Testing

This one could be of your interest if you are an enthusiast eager for new features and not afraid of rough edges. Xfce versioning is quite simple, even versions (e.g. 4.12) are stable and odd ones (e.g. 4.13) are development versions. Since development cycles are very long (2~4 years), at some point the development version gets good enough to be used (read “tested”) on a daily basis. Unsurprisingly development version users may find regressions (new bugs) and getting reports for them is invaluable to developers, this ensures the stable release will be more solid for more people when it comes out.

The bug tracker is where those bug reports live. Please try your best to look if a bug has already been reported and please try to be as more descriptive as possible, but avoid verbosity. Mozilla has a nice guide on how to write a bug report.

Have some Programming/QA/DevOps knowledge? Please, please, please lend a hand to xfce-test, we need automated tests really bad.

Theming

Are you more into design and CSS is a breeze for you? Good news, gtk3 themes are completely written in CSS, you can even use a preprocessor such as Sass. Truth must be said, since the introduction of gtk 3.0 (2011, I guess) there were several compatibility breaks, many theme authors got fed up and abandoned their projects. Fortunately things are more stable since 3.20 (I guess).

Our friends of Project Shimmer have being doing an amazing job, their theme Greybird is shipped on Xubuntu and is now Xfce’s reference theme. Xfce is also supposed to look good under Adwaita (gtk’s default theme). By the way, until 4.12 (gtk2) Xfce ships several classic themes, unfortunately they had to be archived because they need to be rewritten for gtk3.

Finally, as a theme author what are your contribution options? I would say: contribute to Greybird, port/rewrite the classic themes to gtk3, improve Xfce support in other themes out there or roll your own theme!

Since you made this far in this section, perhaps you have web design skills, if so, improvements to our website are also welcome. You may want to file reports for the www.xfce.org project. Just keep in mind that Xfce’s philosophy is about minimalism.

Documentation

Our wiki and docs sites contain many helpful pages, but one doesn’t need to browse much to notice that some have outdated information. Think you can help us with that? Please write a draft or two and share them via the mailing list, we may then give you permissions to edit those pages.

Xfce documentation has some hints on how to write docs.

Coding

This is the most effective way to help, we are always looking for new people to improve, fix, hack and eventually maintain Xfce’s components. You don’t have to be a ninja, just the basic knowledge of a programming language, preferably C, a bit of git and most importantly the desire to learn. Some people are scared of C, because they heard it’s too low level… Fear not, the language is quite simple. Yes, there are pitfalls and gotchas, as any other language, but the experience is improved by gtk’s and glib’s utility functions and abstractions.

First things first, Xfce’s modular architecture feature several components, some are part of its core and some are optional apps or panel plugins. Take some time to read their description. You might wonder what the heck is a window manager? or I never heard of freedesktop.org or d-bus, are they edible?. Search for them, I can’t possibly explain everything there is to know about Linux desktops in a single blog post.

In my opinion the best way to get started with code is to scratch your own itch, you know, deal with that annoying bug or a behavior that could be improved. The rule of thumb is to browse Xfce’s Bugzilla and look for that bug or report it in case no one noticed the problem until now. Then go to Xfce’s repository browser, clone the repository for the component you are about to hack, fix the problem and attach a patch to the bug report. That’s easy for me to say, isn’t it? I’m going to prove you it is not that hard, let’s go step by step.

Building from source

Suppose we are interested in hacking xfce4-appfinder, the first thing we need to do is to build and be able to run that component:

git clone git://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-appfinder
cd xfce4-appfinder
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --enable-debug
make

The ./autogen.sh command will fail if you never compiled a Xfce component before, we need to have installed development packages for dependencies, unfortunately it’s hard to give instructions since package names vary between distributions. In most cases it helps a lot to not panic and read the error message. For example:

checking for exo-2 >= 0.12.0... not found
*** The required package exo-2 was not found on your system.

For Debian/Ubuntu sudo apt install libexo-2-dev does the trick. Actually on Debian/Ubuntu sudo apt build-dep [package-name] installs all build dependencies of the given package, xfce4-appfinder in our case. On Arch Linux, there is no *-dev packages, if you have Xfce installed, you will need to figure out fewer dependencies packages to install and you can also check the makedepends variable from the PKGBUILD of the component you are interested.

Moving on, the --prefix=/usr option is useful if you want to install the component on your system (with sudo make install), it means to replace the version provided by the system package manager. Be aware that daily usage of development builds is cool because of unreleased fixes and new features, but it’s also risky because new bugs may appear or due incompatibilities with stable components.

The --enable-debug allows interesting things for development such as debugging with gdb, more detailed backtraces and compiling warnings. Keep in mind that binaries with debug symbols are larger and possibly slower, often unnoticeable.

After make, the binary is ready to run, however xfce4-appfinder as some other Xfce components run in background (daemon mode), in this case we need to stop its process with xfce4-appfinder -q. Hint: this specific component has a preference to disable daemon mode (Preferences -> General -> Keep running instance in the background), so I recommend disabling it while in “write code-compile-run” loop. Now from the root of the repository, run src/xfce4-appfinder. Congratulations, you have just built your first component! If you don’t believe me, change the window title “Application Finder” (appfinder-window.c) to something else, build and run again with make && src/xfce4-appfinder.

This was just a quick summary of how to build Xfce components, the wiki has a much more detailed explanation.

Smashing bugs

Now to make things interesting let’s fix a bug, but this time I need you to clone and build Mousepad, Xfce’s text editor. The steps are very much the same, except that Mousepad does not run in background which makes things easier. Go on, clone and build it. Hopefully you have successfully built Mousepad by now, if not read carefully error messages spilled on the terminal, if you can’t figure them out searching those messages on the web could be helpful. If you tried really hard and nothing worked, ask for guidance at #xfce-dev, stay online and be patient, try one more time if no one replies after one day.

Now you are able to execute Mousepad with mousepad/mousepad from the source folder, we are ready to smash a real bug. Obviously I wouldn’t be so reckless to let a bug live just for beginners fix it and never push the fix, the bug I have in mind was fixed centuries ago (2014), actually it was one of my first contributed patches. With the magic of git, we can travel back to mousepad-0.3.0 (gtk2!) and smash that bug once again. Before we go back, clean the source folder with make distclean, now you are good to run git checkout mousepad-0.3.0. Git will complain that “you are in ‘detached HEAD’ state”, you might know what that means, otherwise ignore it for now and remember to learn git later, because you know, having a detached head is not comfortable at all ;)

Once again configure and build Mousepad (./autogen.sh && make) and fix the bug… Oh, but I haven’t even told what is broken :) Allow me: execute Mousepad, type “hello world”, save the file somewhere and close Mousepad. Now run Mousepad again and open that file, type some gibberish and choose File -> Revert, it will ask for confirmation, press “Revert” and it says it failed to revert even though it worked. Weird, isn’t it?

So where do we get started? Have a look at the terminal, it says g_error_free: assertion 'error != NULL' failed, looks fishy. Open Mousepad source folder in your favorite editor. I hope the editor you are using features a text search on all files, because to locate the suspect part of code, we need to search for the error message from the dialog, in this case “Failed to reload the document.”. Ignore .po files, they are used only for translations. If you are still following me this far, you might have found the message at mousepad-window.c:3983 and look! Just below that line there is g_error_free which was mentioned by that terminal message, so we must be close, my dear Watson. Notice how that chunk of code is executed only if succeed is FALSE, and succeed is the result of mousepad_file_reload function call. Hmmm, let’s go into that function (mousepad-file.c:859), take your time to read it.

As you might have reckoned (or not, no worries), it starts with state checking, checks if the file still exists, clears a buffer and, the most important part, reloads the file, the result goes into a boolean also called succeed. At this point, you may want to use gdb to debug this code, but I won’t teach you this, there lots of tutorials out there. The poor’s man debug is printf, I use it a lot, though some claim it’s a bad practice. Anyway, try it, put g_print ("succeed is %s\n", result ? "TRUE" : "FALSE"); in the line after succeed gets assigned (mousepad-file.c:886), then build and try to reproduce the bug, messages on terminal may help you understand what is happening. Ok, indeed succeed is FALSE at that point, so let’s dive into mousepad_file_open, then read it.

Found anything interesting? No? Go back and check its signature. Still no? What about its return type? Yes, it returns gint which is assigned to a gboolean variable! How is that even possible? If you know a bit C, you probably know any non-zero number yields TRUE when evaluated in a boolean expression, consequently 0 yields FALSE. If you read that function code, you saw that it returns non-zero when something went wrong (a common pattern in C programs and libraries). By now it should be clear that this is the opposite of what we expect for succeed, 0 means no error but when converted to boolean results in FALSE. So what is the fix? Well, try to figure it out yourself, you have all the information needed :)

Once you have your solution, compare it to the one provided in Bug #10636.

Sharing Code

Now you know how to build components and smash bugs, browse Xfce’s bug tracker and try to fix something that looks easy. If you have an idea on how to fix or some code that seems to work but you are not so sure, don’t be afraid to ask at #xfce-dev. Once you have a good enough solution, attach a patch (see git commit & git format-patch) to the bug report. Wait a few days, if you get no answer, poke us at #xfce-dev or use the Xfce4-dev mailing list. After some merged patches, you may ask commit rights and join the dev club, yay!

By the way, (I hope that) soon we will move our infra to GitLab, so merge requests will be the new standard way to share code, much more convenient IMHO.

Tools

  • Use whatever text editor/IDE you are comfortable with.
  • The terminal is your friend, get used to it, then you will love it.
  • Now that almost all components are gtk3-based, GtkInspector is an invaluable tool.
  • Offline documentation browser such as Devhelp and Zeal are faster and more convenient than using a web browser.
  • Glade is a WYSIWYG interface editor, many Xfce components have their ui created with it.
  • D-Feet is useful when dealing with D-Bus.
  • Tricky bugs will need advanced tools to find their cause, in this case gdb and valgrind are good companions.
  • Xorg’s utilities, for instance xev and xprop.

Communication

  • General user questions? Xfce’s forum and #xfce at IRC/Freenode are the best place to get help.
  • Translation stuff? Xfce-i18n mailing list.
  • Stuck with anything related to code? Xfce4-dev mailing list. Besides that #xfce-dev at IRC/Freenode is where devs hang out. All of us have a real life (I think) and live across different time zones, so once again, be patient and stay online.

Conclusion

I wasn’t sure where to tackle this subject, so here it is: maintainers are awesome folks, but don’t take this role too seriously, it creates frustration in many ways.

Let me explain: someone is trying to figure out how to fix a bug or introduce a new feature, but may think that effort is a waste of time since the maintainer should be much more experienced and able to implement it in the blink of an eye. The bug is not updated for a long time so users get tired of waiting (it’s an absurd, this bug is from 2008!), probably the maintainers are lazy, stupid or both. It doesn’t take long to maintainers also get tired and abandon development for their own reasons. Finally the component is considered unmaintained which greatly reduces the chances of contributions (patches) make their way into releases.

Don’t take that as a rant or as “shut up and let’s work at our own pace”. What I mean is that newcomers are more than welcome to propose solutions and send patches, do not expect a dedicated maintainer for the every component (people come and go). Be proactive, take part, propose, ask, learn, disagree, fix, explain, help and eventually you become a maintainer :)

That’s it, I hope this guide covers as much as possible contribution forms as possible, even at the penalty of its length. And remember, this is a volunteer-based project not a job so have fun!