GTK 4.4.0 is now available for download in the usual places. Here are some highlights of the work that has gone into it.
The NGL renderer and GL support
The NGL renderer has continued to see improvements. This includes speedups, fixes for transformed rendering, avoiding huge intermediate textures, and correct handling of partial color fonts. After some help from driver developers, NGL now works correctly with the Mali driver. We are planning to drop the original GL renderer in the next cycle.
Outside of GSK, our OpenGL setup code has been cleaned up and simplified. We increasingly rely on EGL, and require EGL 1.4 now. On X11 we use EGL, falling back to GLX if needed. On Windows, we default to using WGL.
Our GL support works fine with the latest NVidia driver.
Themes
The included themes have been reorganized and renamed. We now ship themes that are called Default, Default-dark, Default-hc and Default-hc-dark. The Adwaita theme is moving to libadwaita.
Among the smaller theme improvements are new error underlines (they are now dotted instead of squiggly) and support for translucent text selections.
Input
Input handling has seen active development this cycle. We’ve matched the behavior of the built-in input method with IBus for displaying and handling compose sequences and dead keys. As part of this, we now support multiple dead keys and dead key combinations that don’t produce a single Unicode character (such as ẅ).
We fully support 32-bit keysyms now, so using Unicode keysyms (e.g. for combining marks) works.
Emoji
Our Emoji data has been updated to CLDR 39, and we can are looking for translated Emoji data by both language and territory (e.g. it-ch).
Debugging
The Inspector is now enabled by default, so debugging GTK applications should be a litte easier.
Windows
Apart from the WGL improvements that were already mentioned, we now use GL for media playback on Windows. A big change that landed late in 4.4 is that we use the WinPointer API for tablets and other input devices now, replacing the outdated wintab API. DND support on Windows is also improved, and the local DND protocol has been dropped.
The numbers
GTK 4.4 is the result of 5 months of development, with 838 individual commits from 71 developers; a total of 88133 lines were added and 63094 removed.
| Developers with the most changesets | ||
|---|---|---|
| Matthias Clasen | 456 | 54.4% |
| Benjamin Otte | 82 | 9.8% |
| Emmanuele Bassi | 48 | 5.7% |
| Alexander Mikhaylenko | 35 | 4.2% |
| Chun-wei Fan | 30 | 3.6% |
| Christian Hergert | 18 | 2.1% |
| Luca Bacci | 17 | 2.0% |
| Carlos Garnacho | 10 | 1.2% |
| Bilal Elmoussaoui | 10 | 1.2% |
| Florian Müllner | 7 | 0.8% |
| Yuri Chornoivan | 6 | 0.7% |
| Maximiliano Sandoval R | 6 | 0.7% |
| Marc-André Lureau | 5 | 0.6% |
| Marco Trevisan (Treviño) | 5 | 0.6% |
| Pawan Chitrakar | 5 | 0.6% |
| Piotr Drąg | 4 | 0.5% |
| Timm Bäder | 4 | 0.5% |
| Xavier Claessens | 4 | 0.5% |
| Zhi | 4 | 0.5% |
| Sebastian Cherek | 4 | 0.5% |