Tag Archives: QML

Enabling Others to do Awesome

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Recently Aaron wrote a blog series for the introduction of Spark, I want to cite a central saying of one post:

I want the things which I help make to become opportunities for others in their turn to participate with their own voice, their own movement and their own passion.

If I reflect my own motivation for my work on KWin and especially the areas of work I decided to work on in the 4.9 cycle I see quite some parallels to the paragraph cited above. But personally I would phrase it slightly different:

I want to help others to do awesome.

This describes perfectly what I am currently working on. I no longer want to write fancy effects – in fact I stopped adding effects quite some time ago. I don’t want to extend KWin to be the window manager which incorporates all other window manager concepts no matter how useful they are – we stopped doing that as well.

But still I want that our users get the window manager they want. Whether it is fancy effects or a tiling window manager or new concepts for virtual desktops, KWin should be the base for it.

At the heart of all these efforts we have the scripting bindings. While we already had bindings since 4.6 they never really got used – this will change :-) But JavaScript bindings is just one part of the game, the other part is declarative, that is QML, bindings.

In 4.8 we already experimented with QML for the window switcher layouts to test whether QML fits our needs and I am very happy so far with it. But 4.8 does not yet include the possibility to really write own layouts. While it is possible to do so, there is no way to configure a custom one or even distribute this.

For 4.9 the installation of the window switcher has been adjusted to use the Plasma Package structure which makes it possible to install window switcher through the plasmapkg tool. But this is only part of it: plasmapkg has been extended to support any kind of scriptable KWin content, be it window switchers, KWin scripts or KWin effects written in JavaScript (decoration to be added soon).

For this KWin scripts follow also the Plasma Package structure which is quite awesome as it finally allows to dynamically enable/disable scripts through our KCM:

This dialog wants to tell me: “I want Get Hot New Stuff integration” to directly download new scripts from the Internet. And sure it does need that and this will be added for the 4.9 release.

The screenshot shows two scripts I’m currently working on – both will be shipped with KWin in 4.9. Videowall is a script which scales fullscreen video players over all attached screens to generate a video wall. This is the first script which actually replaces functionality from KWin core. KWin had the functionality to disable multiscreen support for fullscreen windows and that really cluttered both code and UI. And it just did not make any sense. There are just no valid usecases to have in general fullscreen windows span all screens, except for video walls. And that’s what we have here: a small KWin script to make an obsoleted functionality sane. We improved KWin for everyone by removing an difficult and confusing control module without taking away the functionality for expert users.

But even more interesting than the video wall is the other script. This is not a JavaScript based KWin script, but a declarative QML script. It will replace the existing C++ based implementation of the desktop change OSD without any functionality loss. Which means less code and much more readable code :-)

And what’s really awesome: JavaScript and QML have the same bindings, the API is exactly the same. So going from QML to JavaScript and vice versa is extremely simple. But that’s not all with QML based KWin scripts you can include live window thumbnails. So this is a technology to allow you to do awesome new switchers like Present Windows or Desktop Grid.

As you notice I’m currently dogfooding the bindings to myself. This helps me to see what is needed, what can be improved and to ensure that the bindings will work for any given usecase we can imagine. My wish is to see for example the complete window tiling support in KWin to be rewritten as a KWin script. This should be possible and would proof that you can use scripting to get a completely different window management.

So if you want to make awesome things with your window manager, now is the time to get started. Don’t hesitate to contact me and demand further bindings if anything is missing.

Disclaimer: QML support has not yet been merged into master.

Aurorae 3: Window Decorations with QtQuick

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Once upon a time there was a window decoration which was KDE’s default decoration. But years ago it fell into a deep sleep. The world changed while the decoration slept. Compositing was added, decorations received shadows, Qt introduced the graphics system raster and many many more changes.

Now after years the decoration temporarily woke up, but it is no longer a beauty, but ugly and old. The changing world made the decoration break. The decoration’s bits started to rot and this is visible. The truth is that the decoration will stay in the broken state as there is nobody who would want to fix it or anybody knowing the code.

What I just highlighted here is true for basically all old decorations. Of the decorations we ship only Oxygen and my theme engine Aurorae are maintained. This is a situation which can no longer continue. We have to face the truth and remove all old decorations.

But of course we don’t want to remove decorations without adequate replacement and this leads us to the story of Aurorae.

Aurorae was written to experiment with new features introduced in KWin 4.3. It was based on our common decoration API and by that is rather limited. So for 4.5 I decided to port it to the generic decoration API and reimplement with GraphicsScene instead of QWidgets. Aurorae allowed to download decorations through Get Hot New Stuff.

But given that it is a theme engine the possibilities are still very limited. Only what the theme engine supports can be rendered. Porting our old decorations to the theme engine might not be possible and not to be recommended.

But still we would like to have those decorations on a modern basis without the maintenance costs. So I started to port Aurorae to QML. This does not only give us a more powerful theme engine but also introduces QML bindings for window decorations, allowing everybody to write decorations with QtQuick.

So we can write themes without the limitations of a theme engine :-) This does not only remove 3000 lines of C++ code and replaces it by around 1000 lines of QML code, but also gives us an interactive decoration control module.

Interactive decoration control module

For Aurorae based themes all the buttons are interactive giving our users the possibility to really try the decoration before using it. But that’s not where it will end. I want to have new themes not based on Aurorae but using QML directly. For that I want to use the Plasma Package structure and would love to see integration in Plasmate. Another idea is to support deKorator themes inside QML.

But as always this does not come without disadvantages. Not all features which were possible with Aurorae will be available in Aurorae 3. Some features will also be dropped because hardly any theme makes use of the features, for example special backgrounds for non-composited setups. Aurorae 3 will hardly work without compositing, so it might be that we will make it a hard requirement somehow.

I hope to see many innovative QML based window decorations in 4.9.

What’s new in KWin Scripting?

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First of all a happy and successful 2012 to everyone. Let’s work together to make this year a great success for KDE!

One of the big topics in 2012 for my development efforts in KWin will be JavaScript bindings and QML. This is a technology which will allow our users to build their own custom window manager giving even greater power to our static window rules as before. It will also reduce our maintenance need when major parts of our UI can be transitioned to either QML or JavaScript.

The work on this area has already started and the first code set has been merged into master (aka 4.9). The old scripting API had manually crafted bindings for around 30 properties for windows. Now the API is generated and everything that is available for effects is also exported to JavaScript, which means more than 60 properties, more properties than before are writable and many more signals are available. Interestingly I could drop several hundreds lines of code by exporting more properties and the code becomes cleaner and better documented. These are changes I really like :-)

The API documentation of KWin scripting is now auto-generated through Doxygen and already imported to techbase together with detailed Update Notes on what changed. If you run master and use KWin scripting be aware that you have to adjust the script. Exactly the same API will be available in QML and also the Effects API is very close – given that the property names are inspired by the Effects API.

One of my favorite changes is that our Plasma Desktop Console is now able to execute KWin Scripts:
Plasma Desktop Console executing a KWin script

To open just use KRunner and type the new keyword “wm console” or start the desktop console and switch using the toolbar button.

This is a very important change for me during development as I can easily test whether my scripts are correct and most important my implementation. But also for users it means that scripts can be tried at runtime and don’t require a KWin restart any more. So adjusting the runtime behavior becomes possible.

So what’s next? I am currently with the progress quite satisfied with the work done so far on scripting and will now concentrate on two other areas first: getting my unmerged kickoff-qml and screenlocker branch into master. Both require still a little bit of work. After that scripting and QML get my number one priority again.

Experience from Porting Kickoff to QML

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As mentioned last week I started to port Kickoff to QML as a training project. Now I am happy to announce that Kickoff with QML is functional and can already be used. If you want to give it a try, just checkout the kickoff-qml branch in kde-workspace and rebuild the kickoff applet. It does not overwrite the existing applet, but adds a second one called “kickoff” instead of “Application launcher”.
Kickoff QML Application View

As we can see in the screenshot Kickoff got connected to all the Models, so we can browse all the tabs, the applications and perform search.

The actual idea was to just do some QML training, but it turned out to be more a training on Qt Models. The Kickoff code is let’s call it interesting. All the tabs have an underlying Model, but what was really surpising is that all Models have a tree like structure. For the Applications Model this was to be expected, but why are the Favorites in a tree structure? As QML is still rather limited for Tree Views I changed the favorites and leave model to be a plain list model which makes it easy to use.

The systems model (applications, places and removable devices) turned out to be more challenging. It uses a QProxyModel instead of QStandardItemModels and merges the applications and places into one Model again in a tree structure. Changing this to no longer being a tree structure seemed non-trivial and I did not want to touch the C++ code. So I started to implement a Tree view in QML for the system tab. Finally I had the QML code to play around with to improve my skills.

After I succeeded in rendering a tree view I noticed a new problem: both places and removable devices showed the same entries and too many entries. It took me quite some time to figure out the problem: the Model is buggy. The proxying was not done correctly and the view so far filtered out entries not relevant to the current section – ouch. This I could not copy in QML as the row count of the Model would not match the count of shown entries resulting in wrong height calculations.

So I had to fix the Model and was back doing C++ programming. Now the Model correctly proxies the underlying Model and I can use the standard views in Kickoff as it is also no longer a tree structure. All my work on the tree view in QML was in vain *sigh*.

Last but not least I had to face the recently used Model. Like all the other Models it has a tree structure. After the experience with the Systems Model it was clear to me that I have to rewrite it as well.

After that the last remaining task was to integrate the search and finally a Model which worked exactly the way I expected it to be. Exported the Model to QML, connected the search field and there were search results. Thanks Ivan for the great job of providing a working Model without having to first fix it.

The results of the work look really promising. Kickoff is much faster, all Models are lazy loaded, that is they get only loaded if the tab is selected. So there is no delay any more when clicking the Kickoff button in the panel :-)

Of course there is still lots of work left for me to train my QML skills. Drag’n'Drop support is missing, context menus are missing. We need some nice animations. But of course there is still lots of time till master opens up.

KWin meets QML

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Two years ago I started to re-implement the Window Switching capabilities of the KDE Plasma workspaces (also known as Alt+Tab or TabBox). The old implementation was based on a QWidget with custom painting which of course had some drawbacks. The new TabBox evolved into a framework around Qt’s Model-View concept to design your own window switcher.

Before I started to work on that area I did evaluate the existing Window Switching capabilities of the various desktop shells (both free software and proprietary solutions) and I noticed that all of them have drawbacks. None is the solution where I would say: that’s the perfect switcher.

The main issue is that depending on the user’s habits different work flows are required. A switcher optimized for users with few open windows fails for users with many open windows and vice versa. Especially thumbnails become useless for many open windows.

So I realized that we need something flexible enough to give users the possibility to use different layouts or to even define their own layout. This ended in a framework for window switching. The layout is described with an XML file and rendered through custom painting code in a Qt delegate.

When I implemented this framework I wanted to add a GUI to easily configure own layout. Unfortunately I never got around to implement this UI and I think there has never been any other layout except the default shipped once. It is a rather unknown feature and I’m quite unhappy that this great functionality never got implemented.

In the mean time the trolls did a great job to make UI development easier: QML. This makes it possible to do what I wanted to have for window switching: easy to design and exchangeable layouts. So this weekend I implemented the default (informative) layout in QML and plan to completely replace the existing View and Delegate code in 4.8. And this gives us the possibility to let users write their own layouts and to share and exchange them.

But this is only the beginning of usage of QML in KWin. I have many more ideas by making window thumbnails available to QML UIs in a limited way. This will allow us to even integrate the BoxSwitch effect into the normal window switching framework and replace the Window Strip in Plasma Active.

So great UI times ahead in KWin.