Start menu xfce-panel plugin

[rozniak]

Whilst theming the built in task switcher and application launcher plugins for xfce-panel is nice, it would be neat to have a proper Start menu (with the Start button) and XP-like taskbar for a closer experience to XP.

With my tiny knowledge of GTK, I suppose the Start stuff could be put together using subclassed GtkButton for the button itself and GtkPopover for the Start menu flyout. Perhaps could reference existing launchers to see how this is achieved.

For the taskbar, I know how to use WNCK for watching open windows so it is mostly the GUI portion that needs looking into.

[rozniak]

I have started working on this in feat-21 branch. Toying around with the Start button at the moment, including styles in the Luna theme. Here's what it looks like:

It's pretty close - might want to tweak the text-shadow a bit to get closer to XP. And yes, this is text-based, so it can be localized.

Some notes on file paths: startbutton.desktop goes in /usr/share/xfce4/panel/plugins libstartbutton-plugin.so goes in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/panel/plugins Images under /res go in /usr/share/winxp/shell-res

The button is currently just a GtkButton, though this will need changing to GtkMenuButton so that the Start menu can be implemented as a GtkPopover.

Will also shift out the Start button as its own class, instead of the current rough proof-of-concept of the plugin code simply building a button in place.

[rozniak]

Sadly the GtkPopover idea isn't going to work - the popover will not display because it lives outside the bounds of the xfce-panel.

Complex problem I think - perhaps might be able to use a GtkToggleButton alongside creating a window with no decoration positioned as required...

[rozniak]

This worked a treat - the menu is now a GtkWindow with no decoration, and will pop up when the button is toggled. Aligned using the XFCE panel API.

Added the tooltip as well (not localized yet though).

[rozniak]

Cleaned up the code a little bit now that this is partially functional.

[rozniak]

Start menu structure is there, will do some styling now.

[rozniak]

Styling is there for the most part now - I need to do a few more things to get this looking right:

Next tasks:

• Need to make the window use CSD so we can get those pesky edges off the top and give the whole Start menu window a popup shadow
• Style separators in the programs and places columns
• Places column needs a test item that will not have bold text (like Control Panel)
• Style the All Programs menu item

In future will need to figure out sizing, whether to figure out how to fill the blank space or simply add a bunch of programs in so it remains the same height always...?

Also need to make sure the columns are always 50-50 - truncate the menu labels if they are too long for programs (places should be fine).

[rozniak]

Start menu now using CSD and looking good style-wise.

I have noticed a weird bug though, and this is unrelated to the CSD code:

Normally the focus-out-event signal fires to hide the window, this works absolutely fine when clicking off the window or focusing another window. I have noticed a strange case though - when the menu window is open, and you select one of the caption buttons on a different window (XFWM4 decorations) - gtk_widget_hide doesn't function correctly. The menu window does not respond to any events, you cannot click on it or anything - if it's in CSD mode it does not render, but it still exists (blocks mouse activity in the area where the window is, even if you can't see it). The window can still be moved as well (including programmatically).

I'm not sure what is going on, I have fiddled with the code with various ideas, but nothing seems to fix this.

This call to gtk_widget_hide is where the problem occurs - and adding return TRUE to prevent other signal handlers running does not fix the problem. Neither does using gtk_window_close instead. https://github.com/rozniak/xfce-winxp-tc/blob/feat-21/shell/start/src/startmenu.c#L376

[rozniak]

Tested with XFCE 4.16 on Debian Testing, this bug doesn't occur. Presumably a bug in 4.12, which Debian 10 ships with. :cry:

[rozniak]

Gotten a lot further since my last comment - I'm currently getting some functionality together and the remaining styles done. Was poking around the source for XFCE's application menu to see how that works and found it uses libgarcon so I have been working with that. I have it displaying the default applications menu so far under the All Programs item.

Here's a screeny of what things are currently looking like:

[rozniak]

Getting there - work has been done on actually dynamically loading the programs from desktop entries, providing custom menu files, and fixing up some remaining styling:

Launching programs sort of works, the Firefox and Thunderbird items aren't working though. Not too much of a worry, I need to fiddle around with the launching in general.

Next things I plan to do:

• Fix up program launching - probably needs use of GLib's argv parsing + some string work to correctly read the commands (Atril document viewer has %U in its cmdline - need to figure out what this is and expand it)
• Look over code and make sure correctly freeing memory allocations as expected by the APIs - probably quite poor at the moment
• Write a replacement menu class to take the place of Garcon's GTK3 menu? Probably a good idea so we can have folder icons + add features in future
• Implement the 'action' launching stuff (for opening My Documents, probs a constant like XP_ACTION_MYDOCS - APIs taking gint already in the definitions)

[rozniak]

Program launching appears to now be resolved as I have implemented the 'field code' expansion and made use of g_shell_parse_argv to construct our launch command. I have also hopefully patched away any memory leaks - referred to GTK and XFCE source code to double check what refs/ownership there are so things should be correct this end.

I should keep the scope of this particular issue small as this is a huge chunk of code waiting to be merged. As such I plan to get things relatively functional, merge this issue, then open more specific issues for features awaiting implementation on the Start menu.

These things should be done and then branch merged:

• Link up some of the actions:
  • My Documents should open ~/Documents
  • My Pictures should open ~/Pictures
  • My Music should open ~/Music
  • My Computer should open / (for now? This sucks and there is not a convenient replacement, maybe if we reimplement Explorer we can do something special there)
  • Control Panel should open xfce4-settings-manager (would be cool if we have a Control Panel... wishlist!)
  • Set Program Access and Defaults should open xfce4-mime-settings
  • Printers and Faxes should open system-config-printer
  • Log Off and Turn Off Computer should open xfce4-session-logout (don't think it would be too hard to create our own XP dialogs for these)
• The other actions should pop up a 'Feature not yet implemented' message for now (probs util.h)
• Implement FIXME: Error handling bits (probs another util.h - maybe a report_g_error_and_clear func)
• Fix alignment of Set Program Access and Defaults

Once this stuff is done, will merge this branch and create separate issues for things to be done in future.

[rozniak]

The above things have all been completed - going to merge this work into master now and create issues for outstanding things to work on in future. It is now possible to use the Start menu fully in place of the XFCE Applications Menu. :grin: