GTK+ 2.6 development

The next stable release of GTK+ will be 2.6, which is planned for December 2004. This release will continue the theme of the 2.4 release, with some small additions, and a focus on improving the new widgets from 2.4.

We are still improving the new file chooser, to make sure that it works really well. The file chooser has produced and is continuing to produce an amazing number of bug reports and enhancement requests. We can't possibly implement every feature that people apparently want to see in a file chooser dialog. But a number of enhancements are very likely to appear in 2.6. The file chooser will share the setttings controlling the display of hidden and backup files, single vs. double click and the shown columns with the Nautilus file manager. The bookmarks system will be made more convenient by making it automatically maintain bookmarks for the most recently visited places. In the save mode, applications will have a way to let the user select the format to save in, as shown in the screenshot.

The new GtkComboBox widget needs a to gain number of features before it can fully replace all uses of its predecessor, the GtkCombo widget. The most notable missing features are separators, insensitive items and scrolling. Insensitive items are already working in cvs HEAD, as the screenshot demonstrates.

A number of features have been prototyped already and are likely to find their way into 2.6. These include commandline argument parsing support for GLib with the goal of replacing the popt library currently used for this purpose in Gnome. There is a prototype of an icon list widget under the name EggIconList in libegg. A progress cell renderer based on the one found in the Epiphany has already been incorporated in the HEAD branch of GTK+. We will probably also try to continue moving generally useful widgets from libgnomeui to GTK+. The candidates are a file chooser entry, which is a combination of an entry with completion for filenames and a button to bring up a file chooser dialog, an image or icon chooser, and a datetime widget, which combines an entry for entering a date (and a time) with a button to bring up a calendar widget.

Pango will make a detour from the release cycle of the other libraries. Pango 1.6 will be released in time for Gnome 2.8. Its noteworthy features will include rotated text, custom font decoders (i.e. use fonts without Unicode mapping).